The farmers protests in India have ignited a widespread resistance movement globally. Focused initially on repressive farm laws enacted by the Indian state, the protests have now expanded to include broader environmental, social, and political concerns impacting the livelihood, independence, and sustenance of working people. What was first seen as an agrarian protest movement has become a rallying call for much-needed debates on dissent, casteism, gender, and economic justice.  

Aarthi Sethi is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. Her primary research interests are in agrarian anthropology, political-economy, and the study of South Asia. She holds degrees in political science, and cinema and cultural studies, from Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University in 2017, and before joining Berkeley, she had postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard and Brown. She has previously published on, and has ongoing research and teaching interests in, urban ethnography and cinematic, media and visual cultures.

Navyug Gill is a scholar of modern South Asia and global history. He is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at William Paterson University. His research explores questions of agrarian change, labor history, caste politics, postcolonial critique, and global capitalism. His academic and popular writings have appeared in venues such as the Journal of Asian Studies, Economic and Political Weekly, Outlook, Al Jazeera, Law and Political Economy Project, Borderlines, and Trolley Times.

Date | Time
May 19, 2021 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
This colloquium is a joint event with the Center for South Asian Studies (CSAS). 

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, May 19th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

To RSVP for the entire Spring 2021 series, please fill out this form.

What does it take to cultivate decolonized subjects in postcolonial times? When anti-colonial struggles are all said and done, and the dust settles on a profoundly reshaped social, economic, and political landscape in their wake, what kinds of intellectual and political labor are required to undo colonized subjectivities and to gradually and systematically produce decolonized ones in their stead? This talk brings the oeuvres of central contemporary Arab thinkers to bear on these questions and discusses what the current resonances of their thought might be for our times. 

Yasmeen Daifallah is Assistant Professor of Politics at UCSC and has been teaching there since January 2019. She arrived by way of UMass-Amherst, the University of Southern California, and UC Berkeley, where she also earned her PhD in political science. She has research interests in critical and postcolonial theory, comparative political theory, and Arab and Islamic political thought.

Date | Time
May 26, 2021 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, May 26th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

To RSVP for the entire Spring 2021 series, please fill out this form.

In the wake of Hurricane Maria, unprecedented attention turned to the unincorporated territory of Puerto Rico and its enduring colonial relationship with the United States. This presentation will examine the rising popularity and shifting strategies of the Puerto Rican statehood movement, which has grown even as the Puerto Rican territory has experienced an unprecedented economic crisis, with failing infrastructure, a seemingly unpayable public debt, and historic levels of out-migration. Within this context many residents envision annexation as the only way of safeguarding a precarious and unguaranteed place within the nation. Bonilla offers an ethnographic analysis of how statehood is imagined and defended by its supporters and shows how this movement uniquely articulates the very contradictions and power asymmetries that structure Puerto Rico’s relationship to the US.

Yarimar Bonilla is a Professor in the Department of Africana, Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Hunter College and the Ph.D. Program in Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment (2015); co-editor of Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm (2019); and a founder of the Puerto Rico Syllabus Project. Bonilla also writes a monthly column in the Puerto Rican newspaper El Nuevo Día and is a regular contributor to The Washington Post, The Nation, Jacobin, and The New Yorker, and a frequent guest on National Public Radio’s Democracy Now! Her current research—for which she was named a 2018-2020 Carnegie Fellow —examines the politics of recovery in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria and the forms of political and social trauma that the storm revealed.

Date | Time
Jan 13, 2021 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
This colloquium is co-sponsored by Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES), the Research Center for the Americas (RCA), and the Anthropology Department.

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, January 13th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

To RSVP for the entire Winter 2021 series, please fill out this form.

The U.S. President’s Inauguration is on January 20th. We use that date as an occasion to think about alternative futures and political possibilities not beholden to colonial and capitalist dispossession, U.S. sovereignty, and the nation-state form, focusing in particular on Indigenous pathways to alternative political-ethical futures. Melanie Yazzie (University of New Mexico) and Michelle Daigle (University of Toronto) will be in conversation with Gina Dent (UCSC) and Caitlin Keliiaa (UCSC) to discuss methods of resurgence and freedom premised on abolitionist, decolonial, and feminist praxis.

Melanie K. Yazzie (Diné) is an Assistant Professor of Native American studies and American studies at the University of New Mexico. She is also the national chair of the Red Nation, a grassroots organization committed to the liberation of Indigenous people from colonialism and capitalism. She does historical research at the intersections of Indigenous studies, feminist and queer studies, carceral studies, Diné (Navajo) studies, and environmental studies. She also does public intellectual and activist work on Native women’s rights, LGBTQ2 rights, environmental justice, policing and incarceration, Indigenous housing justice, urban Indigenous issues, and international solidarity.

Michelle Daigle is Mushkegowuk (Cree), a member of Constance Lake First Nation in Treaty 9, and of French ancestry. She is an Assistant Professor in the Centre for Indigenous Studies and the Department of Geography & Planning at the University of Toronto. Her research examines colonial capitalist dispossession and violence on Indigenous lands and bodies, as well as Indigenous practices of resurgence and freedom. Her current research project is on extractive geographies in Mushkegowuk territory. Her writing has been published in Antipode, Environment & Planning D, and Political Geography.

Date | Time
Jan 20, 2021 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, January 20th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

To RSVP for the entire Winter 2021 series, please fill out this form.

In the last decade, access to digital communication technologies has created opportunities for young people on the margins of the national imaginary in India to take part in transnational media worlds. In his recently published book, Dattatreyan uses the ‘globally familiar’ as an analytic to engage with the recursive effects of online media consumption, production, and circulation amongst young migrant men in Delhi who invest their energies in the Black aesthetics of hip hop. In this talk, he reflects on how, eight years after he first started fieldwork with these young men, the social and economic opportunities that have emerged for them as a result of their online/offline hip hop play continue to shape their gendered aspirations in and through circuits of late capitalism.

Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research engages with the ways in which digital media consumption, production, and circulation shape understandings of migration, gender, race, and urban space. His first book, The Globally Familiar: Digital Hip-Hop, Masculinity, and Urban Space in Delhi, was published by Duke University Press in 2020.

Date | Time
Jan 27, 2021 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, January 27th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

To RSVP for the entire Winter 2021 series, please fill out this form.

This talk addresses a global network of camera operators working on behalf of the Lumière Brothers film company between 1896-1903. Not only did these camera operators record films at sites from Algiers to Berlin to Tokyo, they also pictured the world anew, whether framing a street scene in Alexandria or offering a close up on a passing face in Jerusalem. The Lumière Brothers’ broader vision was to bring the world to the world, and they imagined a global network of films easily circulable beyond the constraints of language and literacy. Engaging the implications of cinematic versus literary capture, Allan’s talk explores the stakes of world literature in the age of the world picture.

Michael Allan is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon and editor of the journal Comparative Literature. He is the author of In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (Princeton 2016, Co-Winner of the MLA First Book Prize). His current research focuses on the travels of the Lumière Brothers film company across North Africa and the Middle East.

Date | Time
February 3, 2021 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, February 3rd; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

To RSVP for the entire Winter 2021 series, please fill out this form.

Reimagining cultural healing ways is central to healing justice, Black Lives Matter, and other contemporary movements. However, “moving from race to culture to creation,” as Resmaa Menakem puts it, takes work. This talk engages in this work by centering epistemologies of Black/African-American traditional medicine, often reclaimed as “conjure.” Drawing on short stories by Zora Neale Hurston and interviews, Jones will consider how Black “knowings” of health, healing, and biomedicine continue to be both racialized and mobilized – and the urgency of taking other(ed) knowledge seriously in this pandemic moment (and beyond).

Naya Jones (she/her/hers) is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Core Faculty in the Global and Community Health Program at UCSC. As a geographer and cultural worker, she especially studies Black geographies of community health and healing in North and Latin America (African-American and Afro-Latinx). Often in partnership with community-rooted organizations, she engages a range of storytelling, embodied, and arts-based methods. She is a former Culture of Health Leader (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, 2017-2020) and a recent recipient of the Anne S. Chatham Fellowship for Medicinal Botany (Garden Club of America).

Date | Time
February 10, 2021 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, February 10th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

To RSVP for the entire Winter 2021 series, please fill out this form.

This talk proposes a cultural genealogy of contemporary human mediatic forms – that is, the use of humans as the media of other humans. Beginning with a reading of José Rizal’s 1891 novel, El Filibusterismo, and its encapsulation of a political moment of transformation of natives (naturales) into nationals, indios into free citizen-subjects, Tadiar explores practices and relations of humans as media in Philippine cultures and the transformation of such persistent forms of life into vital components of today’s global capitalist platform economy.

Neferti X. M. Tadiar is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization (2009) and Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (2004). Her current book, Remaindered Life, a meditation on the disposability and surplus of life-making under contemporary conditions of global empire, is forthcoming from Duke University Press.

Date | Time
February 17, 2021 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
This colloquium is co-presented with the Southeast Asian Center for Costal Interactions (SEACoast).

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, February 17th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

To RSVP for the entire Winter 2021 series, please fill out this form.

Over the last eight months, the lines separating private from public domains of grief, protest from mourning, dying from being killed, the dead from the living, the fleshly from the pixellated, have been blurred. Through sound, theory, image, and affect, Farman and his collaborators explore some practices of daily resurrection and critical mourning.

With visual magic by Shelby Coley and Danielle Gauthier.

Abou Farman is an anthropologist, writer and artist. He is the author of On Not Dying: Secular Immortality in the Age of Technoscience (2020, University of Minnesota Press) and Clerks of the Passage (2012, Linda Leith Press). He is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research and founder of Art Space Sanctuary as well as the Shipibo Conibo Center of New York.

Leonor Caraballo worked as a photographer and video artist between Buenos Aires and New York. She is the co-director of the feature film Icaros: a vision. She has won a number of fellowships and grants, including the Latin American Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, and an Eyebeam Art and Technology Center residency. Leonor left her body on Saturday January 24th, 2015.

Leo and Abou conspire together as artists.

Sholeh Asgary is an Iranian-born interdisciplinary artist who creates immersive works, sound performances, and audience participatory workshops. She has participated in numerous artist residencies, including Headlands Center for the Arts (2021) and Mass MoCA (2021). Her work has been exhibited and screened at ARoS Art Museum, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Minnesota Street Projects, and Gray Area Foundation for the Arts. She is a lecturer in the Department of Art Practice at UC Berkeley.

Hossein Sharang is the founder and president of the Wild Republic of Sharangestan.

(Hossein’s contribution includes music by Claude Maheu.)

Date | Time
February 24, 2021 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, February 24th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

To RSVP for the entire Winter 2021 series, please fill out this form.