End Date : March 28, 6:00 pm
Heyman Center Common Room
Hi'ilei Hobart, University of Texas Austin
Ana Paulina Lee, Columbia University
Anupama Rao, Columbia University
Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity
Institute for Comparative Literature and Society
Institute for Research in African-American Studies
Heyman Center and Society of Fellows in the Humanities
In an effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19, this event has been postponed. We do hope to be able to reschedule it for a future date.
This symposium on “Global Reparations” seeks to connect conversations about reparation, repair and redress across discrete histories of enslavement, outcasting, apartheid, and intimate violence to ask how social suffering is shaped by imperial violence and extractive regimes.
We can begin to map connections across complex structures of state and society to identify patterns in the uneven extraction and the distribution of resources, and distinct modalities for exploiting social difference (race, caste, gender) when reparations are considered on a global scale. However, the nation state works with juridical and financial templates of accountability to redress past wrongs and their enduring repercussions in the present. Though the burden of accountability is often imagined via the calculus of economic loss and gain, and redress is staged as a project of economic redistribution, it is clear that the work of reparations exceeds the logic of economic commensuration. The temporalities of loss, social and physical suffering, trauma and silence are entangled with yet exceed liberal logics of bureaucratic accountability and enumeration.
How might we address historical debt and its ongoing charge? What models of ethics, accountability, and social recognition exist for doing ‘justice’ to complex histories of violated personhood? Can we look to grassroots constitutionalism and movements as models for individual and collective vitality? How do we imagine repair and redress in the wake of catastrophe?
March 27:
6:00 PM Keynote Address by Silvio Luiz de Almeida
7:30 PM Reception
March 28:
9:00 AM Breakfast
9:45 AM Greetings
10:00 AM Repair – David Eng, Robert Meister and Yvette Christianse Discussant: Katherine Franke Moderator: Ana Paulina Lee
12:00 PM Lunch
1:30 PM Land and Extractive Regimes – Tiffany Lethabo King, Macarena Gomez-Barris and Alyosha Goldstein Discussant: Saidiya Hartman Moderator: Tyrone Palmer
3:15 PM Coffee
3:30 PM Land and Reparations – Westenely Alcenat & Ereshnee Naidu Discussant: Rohit De Moderator: Amy Chazkel
5:15 PM Final Reflections – Tarunabh Khaitan; Grace Davie; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Saskia Sassen Moderator: Anupama Rao
6:15 PM Reception
