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