March 7th, 2013 by Kristen Wong | Comments Off on Barnor Hesse – Raceocracy: How the Racial Exception Proves the Racial Rule
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by Green College. Dr. Barnor Hesse. Associate Professor of African American Studies, Political Science and Sociology, Department of African American Studies, Northwestern University. ‘Raceocracy: How the racial state of exception proves the racial rule’. The talk is based on the forthcoming: ‘Creolizing the Political: Race Governance and Black Politics’. It seeks to rethink the meaning of race and racism in relation to questions of western governance; and secondly, to identify a theoretical framework in which to understand ‘Black politics’ as a series of interventions and practices irreducible to the bodies of the populations who produce those practices and interventions. This lecture is part of the ongoing Green College lecture series, “Law and Society.”
Biography
Barnor Hesse is an Associate Professor of African American Studies, Political Science, and Sociology at Northwestern University. His research interests include post-structuralism and political theory, black political thought, modernity and coloniality, blackness and affect, race and governmentality, conceptual methodologies, postcolonial studies.
Select Articles Available at UBC Library
Hesse, B. (2011). Marked Unmarked: Black Politics and the Western political, South Atlantic Quarterly, Fall 2011, 110: 4. [Link]
Hesse, B. (2011). Symptomatically Black: A Creolization of the Political in S. Shih and F. Lionnet eds. The Creolization of Theory. Durham: Duke University press. [Link]
Hesse, B. (2009). Afterword: Black Europe’s Undecidability in D. Hine, T. Keaton and S. Small eds. Black Europe and the African Diaspora. Urbana: University of Illinois press. [Link]
January 28th, 2013 by Kristen Wong | Comments Off on Natalie Zemon Davis – Dealing with Strangeness: Language and Information Flow in an 18th Century Slave Society
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre. This lecture describes the language and practices of translation among slaves and masters in the plantation society of 18th century Suriname. Slaves from different parts of western Africa created a creole language to talk to each other. Two dictionaries were produced of that language through collaboration between free white men and slaves. What did each group learn of the other? Did the flow of information or its silencing facilitate resistance or oppression? The lecture ends with two 19th-century figures who used language for cultural affirmation: one a former slave who wrote about Yoruba, the other a pioneering European linguist who studied the Suriname creole.
Biography
Natalie Zemon Davis is a historian and Princeton professor emeritus who has also taught at the University of Toronto. She is a recipient of the Holberg Prize and was appointed a Companion of the Order of Canada on June 29, 2012.
Select Books and Articles Available at UBC Library
Davis, Natalie Zemon. (2011). Decentering History: Local Stories and Cultural Crossings in a Global World. History and Theory. Volume 50, Issue 2. pp. 188 – 202. [Link]
Davis, Natalie Zemon, Crouzet, Denis, Wolfe, Michael. (2010). A Passion for History. Kirksville, MO.: Truman State University Press. [Link]
