Friday, February 7th: Imperial Debris: Roundtable with Ann Laura Stoler

A Roundtable with Ann Laura Stoler (New School for Social Research) on the publication of Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination (Duke University Press, 2013)

In conversation with Uday Mehta (The Graduate Center, CUNY) , Chelsea Shields (The Graduate Center, CUNY), Neferti Tadiar (Barnard College), Megan Vaughan (The Graduate Center, CUNY), Gary Wilder (The Graduate Center, CUNY).

Friday, February 7th 1:30pm to 4pm Skylight Room Graduate Center, CUNY 365 Fifth Ave, New York, NY 10016

Imperial Debris redirects critical focus from ruins as evidence of the past to “ruination” as the processes through which imperial power occupies the present. Ann Laura Stoler’s introduction, “The rot remains”: from ruins to ruination,” is a manifesto, a compelling call for postcolonial studies to expand its analytical scope to address the toxic but less perceptible corrosions and violent accruals of colonial aftermaths, as well as their durable traces on the material environment and people’s bodies and minds. Contributors Nancy Hunt, E. Valentine Daniel, Greg Grandin, Sharad Chari, John Collins, Ariella Azoulay,  Gastón Gordillo, Joseph Masco, and Vyjayanthi Rao offer provocative, tightly focused responses to Stoler, exploring subjects as seemingly diverse as villages submerged during the building of a massive dam in southern India, Palestinian children taught to envision and document ancestral homes razed by the Israeli military, and survival on the toxic edges of oil refineries and amid the remains of apartheid in Durban, South Africa. They consider the significance of Cold War imagery of a United States decimated by nuclear blast, perceptions of a swath of Argentina’s Gran Chaco as a barbarous void, and the enduring resonance, in contemporary sexual violence, of atrocities in King Leopold’s Congo. Reflecting on the physical destruction of Sri Lanka, on Detroit as a colonial metropole in relation to sites of ruination in the Amazon, and on interactions near a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Brazilian state of Bahia, the contributors attend to present-day harms in the occluded, unexpected sites and situations where earlier imperial formations persist. Ann Laura Stoler is the Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at the New School for Social Research. She is the author of Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense and Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Her books Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things and Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History are both also published by Duke University Press.

Launch for a new book by Paul Amar: The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End of Neoliberalism

Since the end of apartheid, South Africa has become an extreme but not exceptional embodiment of forces at play in many other regions of the world: intensifying inequality alongside ‘wageless life’; proliferating forms of protest and populist politics that move in different directions; and official efforts at containment ranging from liberal interventions targeting specific populations to increasingly common police brutality.

Rethinking the South African Crisis revisits longstanding debates to shed new light on the transition from apartheid. Drawing on nearly twenty years of ethnographic research, Hart argues that local government has become the key site of contradictions. Local practices, conflicts and struggles in the arenas of everyday life feed into and are shaped by simultaneous processes of de-nationalisation and re-nationalisation. Together they are central to understanding the erosion of ANC hegemony, and the proliferation of populist politics.

This book provides an innovative dialectical analysis of the ongoing, unstable and unresolved crisis in South Africa today. It also suggests how Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution, adapted and translated for present circumstances with the help of Fanon, can do useful analytical and political work in South Africa and beyond.

Gillian Hart is Professor of Geography and Co-Chair of Development Studies, University of California, Berkeley, and Honorary Professor, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. She is the author of Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-apartheid South Africa (2002) and co-editor of Gramsci: Space, Nature, Politics (2013).

Gillian Hart is Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley and Honorary Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban South Africa. Her books include Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa (UC Press 2002), and a co-edited volume Gramsci: Space, Nature, Poli- tics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).

Anthony Alessandrini is an Assistant Professor of English at Kingsborough Community College, CUNY. His new book Frantz Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politics focuses on a reading of Frantz Fanon’s work and life, asking how the work of a revolutionary writer such as Fanon might be best appropriated for contemporary political and cultural issues.