This lecture examines the fetishism of colonial commodities as a mediation of often obscured connections between the transatlantic African slave trade to the Americas, settler colonialism, the import of Asian indentured labor, the East Indies and China trades, and the emergence of European liberal ideas of citizenship, wage labor, and free trade in the late-18th and early-19th centuries.

Lisa Lowe is a professor of English and American Studies at Tufts University and a scholar in the fields of comparative literature, and the cultural politics of colonialism and migration. Before joining Tufts, she taught in the Literature Department at UC San Diego for over two decades. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the UC Humanities Research Institute, the American Council of Learned Societies, the School of Advanced Study – University of London, and the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. Lowe is the author of Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Cornell UP), Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Politics (Duke UP), and coauthor of The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Duke UP). Her current project, The Intimacies of Four Continents, is a study of the global conditions for liberal economy, knowledge, culture, and politics.
Seminar with Lisa Lowe:
Tuesday, May 21, 2013 • 11:00 AM • Humanities 1 Building, Room 210
To receive the seminar readings, please contact Courtney Mahaney at cmahaney@ucsc.edu.

This event is organized and sponsored by the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Program. Cosponsored by the University of California Center for New Racial Studies, the Division of Humanities at UCSC, the UC Presidential Chair in Feminist Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Oakes College, and Stevenson College.