Thursday, March 19th | 4:30–6:30pm | Room 5109

John E. Drabinski is Professor of Black Studies at Amherst College. In addition to authoring three books, including most recently Levinas and the Postcolonial: Race, Nation, Other (Edinburgh), he has written over three dozen articles in French philosophy and Africana theory, and has edited book and journal issues on Fanon, Godard, Levinas, Glissant, and the question of political reconciliation. He has just completed a book-length study of Glissant’s poetics entitled Abyssal Beginnings, a translation and critical introduction to Éloge de la créolité, and is currently drafting a book entitled ‘So Unimaginable a Price’: James Baldwin and the Black Atlantic.

Friday, April 24th | 1–7pm | Skylight Room

Featuring Talal Asad (The Graduate Center, CUNY) in conversation with Veena Das (Johns Hopkins University) and Wael Hallaq (Columbia University) about Asad’s essay “Thinking about Tradition, Religion and Politics in Egypt Today” and a talk by Judith Butler (University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University): “Interpreting Non-Violence.”  Reception to Follow.

This event is co-sponsored with the Department of Anthropology.

Tentative Event Schedule

Part I: 1 – 3:30 pm

Opening remarks from Gary Wilder

Judith Butler “Interpreting Non-Violence”

Break: 3:30 – 4:15

Part II: 4:15 – 6:30 pm

Talal Asad in conversation with Veena Das and Wael Hallaq about the essay “Thinking about Tradition, Religion and Politics in Egypt Today”

Reception to follow in Room 5109

live streaming available here:

http://videostreaming.gc.cuny.edu/videos/

Marina Sitrin will open a discussion on how we might understand many of the struggles that have been taking place around the world over the past few years – with a particular focus on Greece and Argentina, where she has spent time. Using the concept of societies in movement rather than social movements, the discussion will focus on those movements where people are looking to one another for power and transformation – and not formal institutions of power – while taking into consideration the rise of left political parties and governments. Examples to be discussed include struggles to defend the earth and the recuperation of workplaces, media and health care.

Marina Sitrin is a writer, activist and scholar. She is the co-author of They Can’t Represent US: Reinventing Democracy from Greece to Occupy (Verso Press, June 2014) as well as the author of Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina (AK Press, 2006) Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina (Zed Books: 2012). Her work focuses on social movements and justice, specifically looking at new forms of social organization, such as autogestión, horizontalidad, prefigurative politics and new affective social relationships. Her forthcoming book with UC Press argues for an expansion of social movement theory putting forward the argument of societies in movement.

The Ruse of Reconciliation? Discursive Contours, Impossibilities, and Modes of Resistance in the South African ‘Reconciliation Project’

A public presentation featuring:

Garth Stevens, Brett Bowman, Gillian Eagle, & Kevin Whitehead

Department of Psychology | School of Human and Community Development |University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

Tuesday, October 13th | 1:30–7:30PM
Proshansky Auditorium, CUNY Graduate Center
Visit the conference website for more information.

The multilayered identity of New York as a global fashion capital has long been defined by the history of the garment industry, fashion and labor. The cultures and economies of the fashion industry and the city of New York have been and continue to be intertwined. The cultural economic impact of the fashion industry on New York City cannot be overstated. New York City’s fashion industry employs 180,000 people and accounts for 6% of the city workforce, generating $10.9 billion a year in total wages, and tax revenues of $2 billion. An estimated 900 fashion companies are headquartered in the city. New York Fashion Week contributes about $850 million a year to the local economy—about twice the economic impact of the 2014 Super Bowl.

Fashion is more than ever part of a wider landscape that intersects with other creative industries (media, visual arts, design, film, craft). Fashion, its manufacturing and culture industry, and its complex media apparatus have contributed to the transformation and histories of several world cities. In many cases, as in New York City, women and immigrants were largely responsible for building the garment industry; and it was their work that intersected with social reforms, political activism, gradual urban transformation and processes of globalization and gentrification.

Some of the questions the conference will address are:

1. How and why does a city become a Global Fashion Capital?
2. What role do the social media and the post-digital experience of today play?
3. How can labor, craft and design survive in the era of Instagram?
4. How do new technologies and big data affect our ways of life, thinking and consuming the city in the city?
5. Is there a new rhythm analysis that needs to be understood?
6. And how can we strengthen our right to the city and allow a new humanitarian sensibility and politics?

This one-day symposium is presented by Fashion Studies at The Graduate Center and the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies, in collaboration with the School of Visual, Media & Performing Arts at Brooklyn College and The Museum at FIT, and the support of Women’s Studies Certificate Program, the Master in Women’s Studies, The Committee on Globalization and Social Change, Data & Society, and The Futures Initiative.

A discussion of Lisa Lowe‘s The Intimacies of Four Continents (2015, Duke University Press), with Susan Buck-Morss, Kandice Chuh, and Eric Lott.

October 15 | 4:30–6:30pm
Skylight Room, CUNY Graduate Center

In this uniquely interdisciplinary work, Lisa Lowe examines the relationships between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries, exploring the links between colonialism, slavery, imperial trades and Western liberalism. Reading across archives, canons, and continents, Lowe connects the liberal narrative of freedom overcoming slavery to the expansion of Anglo-American empire, observing that abstract promises of freedom often obscure their embeddedness within colonial conditions. Race and social difference, Lowe contends, are enduring remainders of colonial processes through which “the human” is universalized and “freed” by liberal forms, while the peoples who create the conditions of possibility for that freedom are assimilated or forgotten. Analyzing the archive of liberalism alongside the colonial state archives from which it has been separated, Lowe offers new methods for interpreting the past, examining events well documented in archives, and those matters absent, whether actively suppressed or merely deemed insignificant. Lowe invents a mode of reading intimately, which defies accepted national boundaries and disrupts given chronologies, complicating our conceptions of history, politics, economics, and culture, and ultimately, knowledge itself.

Lisa Lowe is Professor of English and American Studies at Tufts University, and a member of the Consortium for Studies in Race, Colonialism and Diaspora. She is the author and coeditor of books on orientalism, immigration and globalization, including Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Cornell UP, 1991), Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Duke UP, 1996), The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Duke UP, 1997), and most recently, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke UP, 2015). 

A presentation by Yarimar Bonilla (Rutgers) on  Non-Sovereign Futures: French Carribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment (2015, University of Chicago Press) and Gregory Mann (Columbia) on From Empires to NGOs in the West African Sahel: The Road to Nongovernmentality (2014, Cambridge University Press), in conversation with Omar Dahbour (Hunter College) and Herman Bennett (The Graduate Center, CUNY).

Tuesday, November 10th, 4:30pm
Room 9204
The Graduate Center, CUNY

“Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment marks a significant intervention into debates about Caribbean pasts in the present. Focusing its historical and ethnographic lens on the 2009 labor upheaval in Guadeloupe, the book explores with methodological verve and seminal insight the paradoxical tension between the desire to resist continued dependence on France, and the difficulty of articulating a vocabulary that might embody the collective demand for an alternative mode of political self-determination. In short, the book aims to put into question whether sovereignty can continue to be imagined as the single normative good and ultimate value of modern political life.”

—David Scott, author of Omens of Adversity

“Gregory Mann gives us a thought-provoking, nuanced, deeply researched exposition of what sovereignty does and does not mean in the context of the decolonization of French West Africa and the inability of African states to meet the hopes of most of their citizens. He explores Africans’ immersion in different forms of connection across space, conflicting claims of African states and the French government to regulate cross-border migration within Africa, controversies over the rights of former citizens from Africa to work and live in France, and the effects of NGO interventions on how Africa is governed.”

—Frederick Cooper, author of Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960

Co-sponsored by the Mellon-Sawyer Seminar: Cultures & Histories of Freedom.