from Making World Books
Faint traces of Indigenous people and their histories abound in American media, memory, and myths. Indigeneity often remains absent or invisible, however, especially in contemporary political and intellectual discourse about white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and racism in general. In this ambitious new book, Kevin Bruyneel confronts the chronic displacement of Indigeneity in the politics and discourse around race in American political theory and culture, arguing that the ongoing influence of settler-colonialism has undermined efforts to understand Indigenous politics while also hindering conversation around race itself.
By reexamining major episodes, texts, writers, and memories of the political past from the seventeenth century to the present, Bruyneel reveals the power of settler memory at work in the persistent disavowal of Indigeneity. He also shows how Indigenous and Black intellectuals have understood ties between racism and white settler memory, even as the settler dimensions of whiteness are frequently erased in our discourse about race, whether in conflicts over Indian mascotry or the white nationalist underpinnings of Trumpism.
Envisioning a new political future, Bruyneel challenges readers to refuse settler memory and consider a third reconstruction that can meaningfully link antiracism and anticolonialism.
After a short lecture, Kevin Bruyneel will be in conversation with Chenjerai Kumanyika and Jaskiran Dhillon.
Advance registration is requested.
[May 7 5:00 PM – 6:30 PM ]
ABOUT THE PRESENTERS
Kevin Bruyneel is professor of politics at Babson College and member of the Abolition Colletive.
Chenjerai Kumanyika is a researcher, journalist, and organizer who works as an assistant professor in Rutgers University’s Department of Journalism and Media Studies. His research and teaching focus on the intersections of social justice and emerging media in the cultural and creative industries. He has written about these issues in journals such as Popular Music & Society, Popular Communication, The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture and Technology, and Pedagogy and Education. Dr. Kumanyika is also the Collaborator for Scene on Radio’s Season 2 “Seeing White” and Season 4 on the history of American Democracy he is the Co-Executive Producer and Co-Host of Uncivil, Gimlet Media’s Peabody award-winning podcast on the Civil War. He has also been a contributor to The Intercept, Scene on Radio, Transom, NPR Codeswitch, All Things Considered, Invisibilia, and VICE, and he is a news analyst for Rising Up Radio with Sonali Kolhatkar. As an organizer, Chenjerai is on the executive committee of 215 People’s Alliance, and a member of the Philadelphia Debt Collective and the Media Inequality and Change Center.
Jaskiran Dhillon is a first generation anticolonial scholar and organizer who grew up on Treaty Six Cree Territory in Saskatchewan, Canada. Her work spans the fields of settler colonialism, anthropology of the state, environmental justice, antiracist feminism, colonial violence, political ecology, youth studies, and Indigenous studies and has been published inThe Guardian, Cultural Anthropology, Truthout, Public Seminar, Feminist Formations, Social Texts, and Decolonization—among othervenues. She is the author of Prairie Rising: Indigenous Youth, Decolonization, and the Politics of Intervention (University of Toronto Press) and the coeditor of Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement (University of Minnesota Press). She is associate professor of global studies and anthropology at The New School in New York City and a member of the Making Worlds worker cooperative.
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IN-PERSON EVENT
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