"Race, Justice, and the Politics of Memory"

The 2002-2003 Seminar on "Race, Justice, and the Politics of Memory" is inspired by the debate on reparations to the descendants of American slaves. The Seminar challenges us to think widely and deeply about the long history of redress. How have different societies found methods of repair and restitution in the face of past grievance, as a way for that society to move beyond past injustice? Whether in ancient Rome or contemporary America, humans have grappled with the idea not simply of injustice but of the historical legacy of injustice. How does one acknowledge (or fail to acknowledge) past wrong? What is the basis of judgment? Is historical redress possible? Or are we condemned to cycles of violence and despair based on intricate histories of evil, conquest, subjugation, genocide, retribution, reaction, counter-reaction, terror and counter-terrorism? Is it possible to change the narratives of triumph as well as the narratives of injustice? Is it possible to intervene in narratives of conquest in order to articulate what has been silent or suppressed? What are the components that create "tradition," each generation retelling its collective story to the next? And what are the material and symbolic ways that other societies have addressed these issues?

2002-2003 Franklin Seminar Request for Proposals

RACE, JUSTICE, AND THE POLITICS OF MEMORY

2002-2003 Seminars for Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities

Professors Srinivas Aravamudan and Charlie Piot, Co-Conveners

We aim to explore histories of racial violence and questions of reparation at the break of the new millennium, and welcome applications from those with a range of disciplinary, methodological and theoretical perspectives as well as those who can contribute grounded case studies from different historical periods.

We intend to explore the disciplinary and epistemological foundations and also the limitations of our keywords "race," "justice," "politics," and "memory." How are we to think these terms - both in themselves and in relation to one another? Are the analytical strategies defining and contextualizing "race" (its conceptualization, history, institutionalization, application, revision) and "justice" (truth, principle, testimony, judgement, punishment) capable of a mutual dialogue? If "race" is often a category of perception, categorization, discrimination, and revindication, in what way does "justice" participate - whether secretly or openly - in the construction of "race"? What traffic between past and present is entailed by the conjunction of our keywords, between pasts that are knowable only through a (politics of the) present, and emergent identities that come into being around claims to a past? What essential or strategic or invented identities are assumed, and what notions of ancestry are activated by such claims to a past? While "race" is commonly understood to be a modern category, how do premodern, or ancient histories of group formation, ethnicity, or cultural identity help us understand the difference between a world before and after race? How do we abstract a theory of "race" from lived experiences and situations? Is there a potential conflict between reconciliation and memory, as the former seeks to forget, rather than remember the injustices of race as a history of mutual suspicion, violence, and injustice? How are communal and racial forms of memory different from official and institutional histories? Whose memories are validated - who can claim a past, own a memory - and whose are silenced and suppressed? How do pasts become fungible or remunerable into the present: as apology? as monetary compensation? as renewed commitment to development? Who decides? And finally how might we - in a neoliberal, millennial capitalist moment - think more expansively about questions of identity, ownership, reparation, and restitution?

Cases examined may include (though are not limited to) the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa (and Truth commissions elsewhere), the recent UN Conference on Race, the missing and disappeared in Argentina and across Latin America, Slave Trade reparations, the controversy over Martin Bernal's Black Athena as it impacts on our understanding of the ancient world, other aspects of "racial" subordination, justice, and memory in ancient and premodern worlds, the history of racial violence and lynching in the US, the holocaust, the sociology of caste systems, or other stratifications that use racial, genetic, ethnic, and cultural categories, and the recent genocides in Rwanda and Kosovo.

Any investigation of raced pasts also implies an exploration of futures. We thus also welcome contributions to the seminar that critically engage those new biologisms and racisms that are in circulation today - in the human genome project, in the technologies used in racial profiling, and in the commodification of race in pop culture.

About the Conveners

Srinivas Aravamudan received his B.A. from the University of Madras (India), M.A. from Purdue University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Cornell University. He has taught at the University of Utah, and at the University of Washington. He joined the Duke English department in Fall 2000. He specializes in eighteenth-century British and French literature and in postcolonial literature and theory. He is the author of essays in Diacritics, ELH, Social Text, Novel, and other venues. His study, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804 (Duke University Press) won the first book prize of the Modern Language Association in 2000. He has also edited Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Writings of the British Romantic Period: Volume VI Fiction (Pickering and Chatto). He is completing a book manuscript on South Asian Anglophone satire entitled Guru English and commencing a book-length study of the eighteenth-century French and British oriental tale. He is also editing for classroom use William Earle's antislavery romance, entitled Obi: or, The History of Three-Fingered Jack (1800).

Charlie Piot teaches in Duke's Department of Cultural Anthropology and Program in African and African American Studies. He does research on histories of slavery and colonialism, as well as on contemporary culture and politics, in rural West Africa. His recent book, Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa, winner of the Royal Anthropological Institute's Amaury Talbot Prize for 2000, attempts to retheorize a classic out-of-the-way place as within the modern and the global. He is currently engaged in research on two new projects. One tracks global discourses about female genital cutting (also known as FGM) from Western courtrooms and media into the capitals and villages of West Africa. The other explores the way in which human rights discourse, democratization, development, and charismatic Christianity are articulating with West African political cultures.

2002-2003 Franklin Seminar Fellows

Faculty Co-Conveners
Srinivas Aravamudan, English
Charles Piot, Cultural Anthropology

Faculty Fellows
Ian Baucom, English
J. Kameron Carter, Divinity
Shelia Dillon, Art and Art History
Grant Farred, Literature
Thavolia Glymph, African and African-American Studies, History
Susan Thorne, History
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, African-American Studies (Harvard University)

Library Fellow
Hortensia Calvo, Perkins Library

Graduate Fellows
Alessandro Fornazzari, Romance Studies
Stephane Robolin, English

Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellow
Leigh Raiford, African and African-American Studies (Yale University)