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Most agree that rampant inequalities, which even policymakers are admitting constitute a “new great divergence” not seen since the Industrial Revolution, are at the heart of protest movements everywhere. If this has been only intensified by a global pandemic that might be taking us from recession into depression then the stakes seem only heavier. But how far do we need to understand the uprising as not only movements against inequality, but as more systemic expressions of a refusal of modalities of accumulation? That is, as revolts against dispossession and extractivism? How far is the crisis of capital that underpins these uprisings also a crisis in the nexus between extraction and finance? How central is the question of land in these uprisings? How do we come to terms with the language of looting, theft, plunder that so neatly inverses the subject of dispossession? How far do we need a colonial or settler-colonial historical account of accumulation and inequality to come to terms with the present? How have apparatuses like policing itself in many places become tools of primitive accumulation?
Join Brenna Bhandar, Julia Elyachar and Sherene Seikaly on November 17, 2020, at 9:30 am (PST) to think through these questions and discuss together issues of dispossession, extractivism, inequality, and plunder.
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!
Brenna Bhandar is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her Bhandar’s primary research has centred on the colonial foundations of modern law, taking property (broadly conceived) as its main focus. This research culminated in the publication of Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Duke University Press, 2018), which excavates the co-emergence of racial subjectivities and modern property law in various settler colonies. Brenna takes a fundamentally transdisciplinary approach to her research, and draws upon critical race and feminist theory, critical indigenous studies scholarship, post-colonial theory, political philosophy and legal history.
Julia Elyachar is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and the Princeton Institute of International and Regional Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economy Development and the State (Duke University Press, 2005; Arabic revised edition forthcoming 2020); Thinking from the Levant: Colonizing Commerce, Exterritoriality, and the Common (for review 2020); Diaries of a Palestinian Jew (in the process), and co-editor of Thinking Infrastructures (Emerald Press, 2019). She is a member of the editorial collective of Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and on the editorial boards of the Journal of Cultural Economy and Critical Historical Studies.
Sherene Seikaly is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Seikaly's Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2016) explores how Palestinian capitalists and British colonial officials used the economy to shape territory, nationalism, the home, and the body. Her forthcoming book, From Baltimore to Beirut: On the Question of Palestine focuses on a Palestinian man who was at once a colonial officer and a colonized subject, a slaveholder, and a refugee. His trajectory from nineteenth-century mobility across Baltimore and Sudan to twentieth-century immobility in Lebanon places the question of Palestine in a global history of race, capital, slavery, and dispossession. Seikaly is co-editor of Journal of Palestine Studies, senior editor of Arab Studies Journal, and co-founder and co-editor of Jadaliyya.
Discussant: Manu Goswami is an Associate Professor of History at New York University. Her research and teaching center on nationalism and internationalism, political economy and the history of economic thought, social theory and historical methods. Her book, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space was published in 2004 by the University of Chicago. It was the inaugural volume of an interdisciplinary book series, Chicago Studies in the Practices of Meaning. She is currently working on an intellectual and political history of colonial internationalisms during the interwar decades. Her longer-run research interests include the place and status of empire in the work of major classical and neo-classical economists during the nineteenth and twentieth century. She has worked with graduate students in modern European history, Chinese history, Atlantic World, African history, and the joint MEIS program as well as in American Studies, comparative literature, and sociology. She was a 2010-11 Fellow in the Institute for Advanced Study, and currently serves on the editorial board of Public Culture.
Accommodation requests related to a disability should be sent to kevorkian.center@nyu.edu by November 10, 2020. A good-faith effort will be made to fulfill requests. A captioned version of this presentation will also be made available within a month to the Kevorkian Center's Youtube page.
Also be advised that this Zoom event will be recorded and made available after the event on the Kevorkian Center's Youtube page.
Sponsor(s): Center for Near Eastern Studies, NYU - Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies