Friday, March 16th, 2018 Not Yet: Indigeneity, Antiblackness, and Anticolonial Liberation

Description

There will an informal drop-in chat session with interested faculty, students and staff with Prof. Byrd prior to the lecture. The drop-in session will take place in Room 108N – North House, 1 Devonshire, Munk School of Global Affairs at 2-3:30PM

*Please note the lecture has been relocated to the 1st Floor Conference Room in the Jackman Humanities Building, University of Toronto, 170 St. George Street, Toronto, ON M5R 2M8*

Abstract:

In the song “Immigrants (We Get the Job Done)” from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton Mixtape, the settlement of the Americas is framed through liberal understandings of arrival and immigration that transform chattel slavery and forced labor into the exceptional narratives of pulling oneself up from hard labor to freedom. It reflects current political mobilizations against xenophobia and immigration bans that insist that we are all immigrants to the Americas. And it erases completely the ongoing colonization of Indigenous peoples and lands. At the same time, Indigenous studies has come under critique from a range of scholars who argue that assertions of sovereignty and land hinge on the afterlife of slavery, the endemic possessive logics of antiblackness constitutive of new world politics, and the xenophobia of territories and borders. Rather than approach these discussions as representative of a historical and ontological impasse, this talk will engage recent work in Indigenous critical studies and Black studies to think through how antiblackness and colonization produce dispossession. How might we imagine anticolonial liberation outside and beyond the structures of settler whiteness?

Biography:

Jodi A. Byrd is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and associate professor of English and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she is also a faculty affiliate at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. She is the author of Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minnesota, 2011). Her articles have appeared in American Indian Quarterly, Cultural Studies Review, Interventions, J19, College Literatures, Settler Colonial Studies, and American Quarterly. Her teaching and research focuses on issues of indigeneity, gender, and sexuality at the intersections of political studies, postcolonial studies, queer studies, comparative ethnic studies, and technology studies. Her current manuscript in process, entitled Indigenomicon: American Indians, Videogames, and Structures of Genre, interrogates how the structures of digital code intersect with issues of sovereignty, militarism, and colonialism.