GLOBAL UPRISING: Racism, Racialization, Anti-Blackness

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How might we think uprising in light of the resurgence and relegitimization of racial/racist thought? How do we think historically about the return of certain colonial grammar and rhetoric in right-wing reactionary thought—”reverse colonization,” “white genocide,” “replacement theory”?  In the now total collapse of the multicultural normative consensus and imagery of the global village, how does this period recall but also implore us to reimagine Afro-Arab, Afro-Palestinian, or ‘third worldist’ assemblages and solidarities? What is or might be the place of Blackness and Black liberation in wider constellations of anti-racist and anti-colonial politics? Or, in solidarities against resurgent transphobic and homophobic politics? If the brief foray into a social-democratic revival has collapsed under the twin weight of racist nativism on the one hand and its own national limitations on the other, then how might we reimagine what’s left of internationalism?

• Join the Kevorkian Center with Sophia Azeb, Eve Troutt Powell, Zoé Samudzi, and discussant Fred Moten on September 15, 2020, at 12:30 pm (EST) to think through these questions. To register for this event, please follow the link here or copy and paste into your browser: bit.ly/NYUKevoGU915

In order to prepare for this event, please read the following documents provided to you by our panelists. You can find the readings here.  Please note that we will be adding new readings up until the week before the event, so kindly please keep checking the folder!

• Sophia Azeb is an Assistant Professor of Black Studies in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago. Her current book project, Another Country: Constellations of Blackness in Afro-Arab Cultural Expression, examines how Blackness and Black identity is variously translated, mobilized, circulated, and contested by African American, African, and Afro-Arab cultural figures in North Africa and Europe in the twentieth century.
• Eve M. Troutt Powell is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania. She teaches the history of the modern Middle East and the history of slavery in the Nile Valley and the Ottoman Empire. As a cultural historian, she emphasizes the exploration of literature and film in her courses. Her most recent book is Tell This in My Memory: Stories of Enslavement in Egypt, Sudan and the Late Ottoman Empire (Stanford University Press, 2012).
• Zoé Samudzi is a writer and Ph.D. candidate in Medical Sociology at the University of California, San Francisco where she is working on a dissertation about German colonial biomedicine and the Herero and Nama genocide (1904-1908). She is co-author of As Black as Resistance (AK Press 2018) and a research fellow with Political Research Associates where she is writing a report about contemporary white nationalism and white supremacy in the United States.
• Discussant: Fred Moten is a professor in the Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts. He holds an A.B. from Harvard and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Global Uprising is a year-long series that revolves around one question: how do we rethink collective action from our present?  Taking the current anti-racist uprising in America and the tenth anniversary of the Arab revolts as launching points for a set of workshops this series delves into the global coordinates of uprising today.  Read more about the series here.