Join Alyosha Goldstein and Simón Ventura Trujillo, co-editors of ‘For Antifascist Futures: Against the Violence of Imperial Crisis,” in conversation with Nikhil Pal Singh, Macarena Gomez Barris, and Nadia Abu El-Haj. If you have any accessibility needs for this event, please email us at latinxproject@nyu.edu.
Panelists
Simón Ventura Trujillo is an Assistant Professor of Latinx Studies in the English Department at New York University. His book, Land Uprising: Native Story Power and the Insurgent Horizons of Latinx Indigeneity (University of Arizona Press, 2020), explores Indigenous land reclamation to rethink connections between Native storytelling practices and Latinx racialization across overlapping colonial and nation-state forms. Professor Trujillo teaches courses on Latinx Studies, American ethnic literatures, 20th century literature and culture, intersectional theories of race, indigeneity, and decolonial social movements. His pedagogy engages the practices of textual analysis, writing, and collaborative research to study how the social construction of identity—including race, gender, sex, class, and nationality— occur as a function of language. His students explore how work on language generates alternative identities, histories, and spatial imaginaries that resist historic forms of oppression and inequality.
Alyosha Goldstein is a Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico. Goldstein's research interests include the study of globalization, neoliberalism, and social movements; comparative histories of imperialism, colonialism, and nationalism; modern liberalism and twentieth-century political culture; critical race and indigenous studies; the history and politics of public health; and social and political theory. Poverty in Common: The Politics of Community Action during the American Century (Duke University Press, 2012), Goldstein’s first book, examines mid-twentieth century community-based antipoverty initiatives in the United States within the context of the Cold War, decolonization movements worldwide, and grassroots struggles for self-determination. Began as a dissertation in American Studies at NYU, it was awarded the American Studies Association's Ralph Henry Gabriel Dissertation Prize in 2005. Goldstein’s current research focuses on United States colonialism, the normative racial and gendered logics of neoliberalism, and economies of dispossession in the historical present. He is working on a book manuscript entitled “Colonial Accumulations: Racial Capitalism and the Colonial Present” that uses recent legislation as a critical analytic lens through which to address current debates over racism, colonialism, and other modes of expropriation and devaluation, and to examine the jurisprudence of redress during our present era of economic crisis.
Charisse Burden-Stelly is a critical Black Studies scholar of political theory, political economy, intellectual history, and historical sociology. She pursues a research program that encompasses two complementary lines of inquiry. The first interrogates the transnational entanglements of U.S. racial capitalism, anticommunism, and antiblack structural racism. Her second area of focus examines twentieth-century Black anticapitalist thought with a particular focus on W.E.B. Du Bois and scholar activists in his intellectual community. She is the co-author, with Dr. Gerald Horne, of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History, and she is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled Black Scare/Red Scare: Antiblackness, Anticommunism, and the Rise of Capitalism in the United States in which she examines the rise of the United States to global hegemony between World War I and the early Cold War at the intersection of racial capitalism, Wall Street imperialism, anticommunism, and antiblackness.
Macarena Gómez-Barris is Chairperson of the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies and Director and Founder of the Global South Center at Pratt Institute. She is author of The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives that theorizes social life through five extractive scenes of ruinous capitalism upon Indigenous territories (Duke University Press, 2017). Macarena is author of the recently published Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (August 2018), a text of critical hope about the role of submerged art and activisms in troubled times. She is also author of Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (2009), and co-editor with Herman Gray of Towards a Sociology of a Trace (2010). Macarena has written numerous articles and essays in art catalogues as well as peer reviewed journals, including writing on the work of Julie Mehretu, Laura Aguilar, Carolina Caycedo, Regina José Galindo, Cecilia Vicuña, Francisco Huichaqueo, and Patricio Guzmán.
Nadia Abu El-Haj is Ann Whitney Olin Professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies, and Chair of the Governing Board of the Society of Fellows/Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. She also serves as Vice President and Vice Chair of the Board at The Institute for Palestine Studies in Washington DC. The recipient of numerous awards, including from the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner Gren Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Harvard Academy for Area and International Studies, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, she is the author of numerous journal articles published on topics ranging from the history of archaeology in Palestine to the question of race and genomics today. Abu El-Haj has published two books: Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (2001), which won the Albert Hourani Annual Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association in 2002, and The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology (2012). While Abu El-Haj’s two books to date have focused on historical sciences (archaeology, and genetic history), her third book, forthcoming in 2022 from Verso, examines the field of (military) psychiatry, and explores the complex ethical and political implications of shifting psychiatric and public understandings of the trauma of American soldiers.