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. We know that nation states work 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, however, it is clear that the work of reparations exceeds the logic of economic commensuration. “Global Reparations” thus gestures to an attempt 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. 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

Silvio Luiz de Almeida

7:30 PM, RECEPTION

MARCH 28

09:00 AM, BREAKFAST

09:45 AM, GREETINGS

10:00 AM, REPAIR

David Eng, Robert Meister and Yvette Christianse

Discussant: Katherine Franke

Moderator: Ana Paulina Lee

12:00 PM, LUNCH

01:30 PM, LAND AND EXTRACTIVE REGIMES

Tiffany Lethabo King, Macarena Gomez-Barris and Alyosha Goldstein

Discussant: Saidiya Hartman

Moderator: Tyrone Palmer

03:15 PM, COFFEE

03:30 PM, LAW AND REPARATIONS

Westenely Alcenat & Ereshnee Naidu

Discussant: Rohit De

Moderator: Amy Chazkel

05:15, FINAL REFLECTIONS

Tarunabh Khaitan; Grace Davie; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Saskia Sassen

Moderator: Anupama Rao

6:15 PM, RECEPTION

Co-sponsors: Office of Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement; Center for the Study of Social Difference; Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality; SOF/Heyman; Latin American and Iberian Cultures; Institute for Latin American Studies