Ross Johnson Distinguished Speaker Series 

Date: Thursday, March 14, 2019
Time: 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Location: University College, Room 140
Speaker: Nikhil Pal Singh,
Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History
Faculty Director, NYU Prison Education Program
New York University

As Donald Trump conjures visions of battering “Chinese walls” to US commerce and erecting border walls to stem drugs, crime and surplus people from “s**thole countries” of the Western hemisphere at the center of his foreign policy project, we might want to reconsider the place of racial imaginaries within US foreign relations. In dominant scholarly accounts of post-WWII US foreign policy-making, civilizational, race-thinking retreated in the face of both IR realist and liberal internationalist concerns with the management of decolonization under aegis of global capitalism. In this talk, I consider how a tradition of what we might term, “race realism” has endured, shadowing and supplementing post-WWII globalism. In this, as in many aspects of the contemporary moment, Trumpism marks a return of what has been repressed.

*This event is co-sponsored by the Centre for the Study of the United States at Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy and the Department of Geography & Planning at the University of Toronto.