This talk has been postponed. For a rescheduled date, please check the Capitalism and Comparative Racialization project page in Winter 2018. Jodi Melamed speaks on race and capitalism as part of “Capitalism and Comparative Racialization,” a 2017-2018 John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. How can we explain the open secret of permissible violence for racial capitalist accumulation, in the US and globally? Melamed argues that we must come to grips with the diffuse and deadly capacities of administrative power to give impunity to racial capitalist violence through seemingly neutral repertoires of "democratic" and "technical" governance. In this talk, she examines administrative violence in terms of settler logistics: the organizing, managing, and coordinating of flows of things (meanings and resources) in order to continuingly materialize infrastructures of “ownership” for those who have taken possession. She discusses the importance of contemporary Native-led and Palestinian-led boycott and divestment actions, which turn the geographic-economic processes underpinning settler logistics and racial capitalisms into vulnerabilities. Jodi Melamed is Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies at Marquette University. Her current research aims to provide an anti-racist critique of contemporary global capitalism and an anti-capitalist critique of historically dominant U.S. anti-racisms. She is the author of Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and a contributor to Strange Affinities: The Sexual and Gender Politics of Comparative Racialization (Duke University Press, 2011) and Keywords for American Cultural Studies (NYU Press, forthcoming). Her next book project, Capital’s Metabolisms, investigates representational and relational dimensions of ‘bio-financialization’ (the nexus linking life and financialization) in neoliberalism. |