Sailing vessels or dhows have long connected different parts of the western Indian Ocean, transporting goods, and people across South Asia, the Middle East and East Africa. These dhows now function as an economy of arbitrage, servicing minor ports in times of conflict. This talk focuses on the contemporary dhow trade, centered in port […]

  This paper analyzes Althusser's proposal for an aleatory materialism through his engagement with historical materialism, and particularly with Marx on "primitive accumulation." It identifies two different legacies of Marx's reflections on the origins of capitalism and discusses how Althusser attempted to rework Marx to reach a non-teleological conception of history. At the same time, […]

  In this paper, “‘I am he:' Revising the Theory of Dispossession from Colonial Yucatán,” I examine a legal case involving an enslaved Afro-diasporan named Juan Patricio and a Mayan woman named Fabiana Pech from turn-of-the-eighteenth-century Yucatán. The case challenges a fundamental presupposition of many contemporary theories of dispossession: namely, that the dispossessed had prior possession […]

The modern Arab reader cannot be indifferent when reading a novel like Don Quixote. Through its geography, historical context, characters and language, the novel evokes to the modern reader one of the Arabs’ most splendorous historical episodes: Al Andalus. This talk traces the Arab and Andalusian presence in Cervantes’ Don Quixote from 1605, and how […]

Legal age standards for sexual maturity are challenging enough to devise at the state or national level, but they are especially contentious at the intergovernmental level. Efforts at setting common standards have often been marked by imperial logics on the part of those proposing common standards and misgivings on the part of those most affected. […]

“What More Remains: Sexuality, Slavery, Historiography" This talk engages a ‘small’ history of sexuality and slavery in Portuguese India. At stake are three questions: How do we call attention to the displacement of slave pasts within histories of sexuality that are themselves routinely displaced?  How do we locate those displacements in itinerant archives of profit […]

Please join David L. Eng for a discussion of his new book, Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans (Duke University Press, 2019), co-authored with Shinhee Han. The book draws on case histories from the mid-1990s to the present to explore the social and psychic predicaments of Asian American young adults from Generation […]

Sara Mameni “On the Terracene” This talk considers the Anthropocene from the perspective of artists working within areas devastated by the War on Terror. While the popularization of the concept of the Anthropocene dates to the early 2000s–the very moment of the declaration of the War on Terror–the two modes of imagining the geopolitics of […]

“When is a Boycott a Boycott? Lebanon, Palestine and Hollywood, and the Arrest of Ziad Doueiri” This paper looks at the arrest and court case of Lebanese film director, Ziad Doueiri. Doueiri broke the 1955 Boycott Law by shooting a film in Israel, using Israeli and Palestinian actors. The film was then banned across the […]

“What is Political Cruelty? An Archeology of the Liberalism of Fear” Under what conditions might fear become a saturating phenomenon of liberal democracy and extreme violence cease to be even a moral crime? Is this silent war on the body and idea of the citizen on the constitutional theorist and moral philosopher B. R. Ambedkar’s […]