Sandra Harvey

In her much-celebrated The Transit of Empire, Chickasaw critical theorist Jodi Byrd begins a chapter on colonial multiculturalism with a story about land desecration and grave robbing that has stuck with me for years. As she writes, around the turn of the 20th century, archeologist Charles Peabody hired black workers to excavate mounds within the Mississippian Ceremonial Complex...

This essay reads the narratives of HeLa cell contamination as accusations of racial and gender passing. It argues that the passing narrative is much more complex, rarely confined to an individual's autonomous will, and far more entrenched in state building and concepts of social progress than previously considered. I urge us to move away from the desire of the passing subject, and back to our own to ask after the sort of anxiety, excitement, and panic that animate our attempts to see, classify, and regulate bodies. Thus, what becomes significant is an examination of an " ethics of knowing " within science. The paper draws on a collection of correspondence, lab notes, published articles, and newspaper clippings related to Henrietta Lacks and HeLa from the George O.

Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora Keguro Macharia New York, New York University Press, 2019, 224pp., ISBN: 9781479865017

The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies Tiffany Lethabo King Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2019, 304pp., ISBN: 978-1-4780-0636-7

A veces me encuentro pensando en Joane Florvil, en cómo fue su llegada a Chile, su vida en familia, el día de su arresto y los últimos minutos de su vida. Esta obsessión no es consecuencia del síndrome de estrés postraumático en que algo inocente desencadena la vuelta a un momento traumático del pasado. No hay nada "post" de la muer-te negra. Cada amenaza de violencia banal funciona más bien como el deja vu. Se podría decir que Joane falleció de nuevo en Estados Unidos, el 25 de mayo de este año cuando un policía asesinó a George Floyd.

Link to Off the Record: http://www.offtherecordonline.cl/?fbclid=IwAR2f_QiS-gtr1BKaETwmw7ys_jMtJuQfoo2HpU_fToVlppvJqppNik1dpSg

Passing for Free, Passing for Sovereign examines the relationship between narratives of race and gender passing, histories of slavery that these narratives draw upon, and the hetero-nationalist imaginaries that they inform. Much of the scholarship on passing emphasizes the political and affective agency of “passers” to attain social mobility or escape racialized and gendered violence. However, this approach often pre-supposes an individual with autonomous and rational, liberal agency. It also leaves under-examined the accusation of passing itself. In contrast, this dissertation brings to the forefront accusations of passing as techniques of disciplining bodies and regulating populations in order to investigate the political assumptions embedded within them. It points to the ways the passing accusation has been institutionalized in a range of historical periods and spheres of activity including: positivist science, which centers the human as the knowing and unveiling subject; law and...

Course description: This class examines how "science" participates in, creates, and is created by understandings of race, gender, sexuality, and nation. We begin by tracing the role of colonialism and its practices of " knowing, " " containing, " and " producing " the Global South through emerging cultures of science. In paying attention to the ways colonial sciences produce worlds, we begin to interrogate the connections between gender, race, and the settler nation. We'll discuss what sorts of racialized and gendered citizens and what sorts of desires are produced through science, capitalism, and later neo-liberalism. In the second part of the class, we will begin to think about Western science as a particular way of knowing things in the world (epistemology) and trace its historical and philosophical emergence. We'll ask after the sorts of assumptions we make about ourselves and the world around us (ontology), and how these claims differ from other ways of being in the world. Finally, we begin to imagine the futures of our epistemologies, ontologies, and cosmologies for the world we inhabit.

Course objectives: We often take for granted the notions of indigeneity and diaspora as a priori terms that describe nations and people, their relationships with each other, and their relationships to the spaces or land to which they " belong. " This class begins to examine the binary idea of indigenous, or Native, on one side and diaspora on the other. We will do so by exploring the relationship between histories of settler colonialism, genocide, chattel slavery, proletariat labor, and our ideas of who is considered indigenous and who is considered part of a diaspora. In the " Americas, " we will discuss how colonialism and post-colonial nationalism continue to take part in shaping our ideas about these categories. We will also examine what sort of politics is made possible in claiming either status. For example, what sorts of claims can a nation, a pueblo, or a community make from the position of indigenous? Autonomy? Sovereignty? Recognition? Reparations? And how do nations " authenticate " their status? We will then explore transnational indigenous struggles and the notion of global indigenisms. We ask how have local movements coalesced and in what ways have they not. What role do the ideas, policies, and institutions of Human Rights have in the struggle for Black and Indigenous sovereignty? Finally, we ask whether we can imagine new cosmologies of freedom or sovereignty that take into account our entangled histories.

This course provides an introduction to important themes in Western modern political theory. Much of this genre of knowledge is organized around the question of difference. Theorists have asked: Are we different from each other? If so, how? And how do we manage this difference? These suppositions, questions, arguments emerge and are shaped by major historical events including colonialism and the industrial revolution, the history of capitalism and slavery in the Americas, anti-colonial revolutions and post-colonial nationalism, and war and migration. In this class, students will engage in close readings of key political texts and begin to trace the way that the question of difference (religious, racial, gendered, sexual, class) is formulated and managed. We ask, " What sorts of political imaginaries, possibilities, and projects are opened up and/or foreclosed within these bodies of knowledge? " A note on methodology: Students will be asked to engage in close readings of texts, including literature, art, manifesto, and more orthodox " political theory texts. " We will pay close attention to the ways in which the genres of speech/writing shape the possibilities of political critique.