The era of the Enlightenment, which gave rise to our modern conceptions of freedom and democracy, was also the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. America, a nation founded on the principle of liberty, is also a nation built on African slavery, Native American genocide, and systematic racial discrimination. White Freedom traces the complex relationship between freedom and race from the eighteenth…
Join us for another installment of the 19v seminar. This event will be held virtually as a Zoom meeting: https://nyu.zoom.us/j/99102207490. This talk will explore how the pastoralism of Notes from a Hunter neither ignores history nor gives up on the nostalgic dream of frozen time as it moves between poles of dynamism and repose and struggles with the relentless expectations of…
Hannah Arendt advocates a concept of political freedom that is intimately linked to the appearance of the person on the public stage. However, Arendt's theory of public appearance is wrested from the problems of disappearance and invisibility - under totalitarian regimes, under conditions of slavery and poverty. To better understand the intuition behind Arendt's persistent adherence to a notion of…