2004-2005 Seminars

**Atlantic and Global War" Symposium**
Friday, April 22
full schedule

As part of its inaugural year, the Institute for Critical U.S. Studies is sponsoring two working seminars for faculty and graduate students: “The Other American Century: The Modern History of U.S. Repression,” convened by Jocelyn Olcott (olcott@duke.edu), and “The Atlantic and Global War” co-convened by Charlie Piot (cpiot@duke.edu) and Ian Baucom (ibaucom@duke.edu).

“The Other American Century: The Modern History of U.S. Repression”

This year-long, monthly seminar examines the work of scholar activists whose work focuses on various aspects of repression both within the U.S. and emanating from the U.S. The first semester will center on five invited guests whose intellectual work crosses the boundaries between public and academic interventions. Each visitor will deliver a public lecture as part of the Franklin Humanities Institute’s “Risky Knowledge” program and then will meet with seminar participants over lunch the following day to discuss short readings from their own scholarship and/or conceptual and theoretical interventions that they have found particularly compelling. We will have one visitor for the second semester, but the meetings will otherwise center on mutually agreed-upon readings on the theme of U.S. repression, broadly understood. The visitors include:

Many thanks to the following co-sponsors:
Department of History
Franklin Humanities Institute "Risky Knowledge" Series
Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Women's Studies

For further information please contact Jocelyn Olcott at olcott@duke.edu

“The Atlantic and Global War”

Drawing on the recent critiques and rethinkings of area studies and the disciplines, and building upon Atlanticist, especially Black Atlanticist, scholarship, this graduate/faculty working group is committed to rethinking the US through its ties to Africa and the Atlantic world. We thus intend to explore new knowledge/s at the intersection of the U.S., Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean and at the conjuncture of a range of humanities and social science disciplines (including English, literature, cultural anthropology, history, cultural studies, women’s studies, African American studies).

The focus of this year’s seminar is war and war-making in the circum-Atlantic world – in all its raced, gendered, and newly globalized forms. Africa especially has been the site of recent and unprecedented types of warfare and genocide. From the atrocities in Sierra Leone and Liberia (and, now, Cote d’Ivoire), to the genocides in Burundi and Rwanda, to the camp massacres in Congo, to the unending civil war in the Sudan, to the incarcerations and disappearances that have characterized regimes across the continent, and finally to the vast unregulated zones of neglect that are expanding each year, necropolitics has become a way of life for much of the continent. We aim to interpret these phenomena, however, not through any primordialist optic nor through any strictly regional or continental explanatory lens but rather through the logic of global war (and through new theories of global Empire). We also want to think African death-dealing in relation to zones of abjection and neglect and unending warfare in the Caribbean and the U.S. Scholars whose work will engage us include Mahmoud Mamdani, Achille Mbembe, Francoise Vergès, James Ferguson, Judith Butler, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Gilles Deleuze, and Giorgio Agamben.

** Events **

"The Atlantic and Global War" Symposium
Friday, April 22
Nelson Music Room, East Duke Building

Schedule of Events:

9:30-11:45am: Session I
panelists:
Achille Mbembe (University of Witwatersrand)
Danny Hoffman (University of Washington)
Francoise Verges (University of London)

1:15-3:30pm: Session II
panelists:
Janet Roitman (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)
Alexis Gumbs (Duke)
Tony Anghie (University of Utah School of Law)

3:30: Response and Discussion
Discussants:
Srinivas Aravamudan
Michael Hardt
Sarah Lincoln

Archive:

Tuesday, April 12, 7pm, in 328 Allen Building
Readings:
Janet Roitman, "The Garrison Entrepot"
Francoise Verges, "Politics of Predation"

Wednesday, March 23, 5:30-6:45pm in 130 Franklin Center
James Siegel (Cornell University Department of Anthropology) will lead a discussion of Louis Hartz.
Readings:
Louis Hartz, "The Nature of Revolution"
Louis Hartz, The Founding of New Societies excerpt
Siegel is author of Fetish, Recognition, Revolution (1997) and A New Criminal Type in Jakarta: Counter Revolution Today (1998)
Light refreshments will be provided.

Tuesday, February 15, at 7pm in 328 Allen Building
Readings:
Excerpt from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York, 2004):
pp 3-67 (Part 1)
pp 68-95 plus notes (Part 2)

For further information, please contact Charlie Piot at cpiot@duke.edu