Robin D. G. Kelley: “Freedom is a Place”: On War, Displacement, and Genocide in the 21st Century
Robin D. G. Kelley: “Freedom is a Place”: On War, Displacement, and Genocide in the 21st Century
Please join us for a talk titled “'Freedom is a Place': On War, Displacement, and Genocide in the 21st Century" by Professor Robin D. G. Kelley of UCLA. This event is part of the Bebe Koch Petrou Lecture Series and is co-sponsored by the Frederick Douglass Center for Leadership Through the Humanities.
Abstract:
Displacement is not an event but a condition that appears to define the current state of the world. Its source in every case is war, which has become the prevailing mode of governance. If Ruth Wilson Gilmore is right, that “freedom is a place,” than most of the world lives in a state of unfreedom, ruled by thanatocracy and a new form of fascism. I’m speaking of 123 million displaced people, 150 million homeless, dodging bombs and bulldozers in war zones, Black and Brown people living under a modern police state, native peoples all over the world still fighting 500 years of dispossession, and so forth. I will meditate on what this means by looking at several “theaters” of war—from policing in u.s. cities to Palestine, Sudan, Congo, Standing Rock; aggressive class war on working people and the poor; the fascist regime of mass deportation, the genocidal disappearance of trans people, the vicious, ableist and racist resurrection (and legitimation) of eugenics, and so on. If this is the world we’re struggling to transform, then what does it mean to create a place of freedom? What is home?
About the Speaker:
Robin D. G. Kelley is Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nahs Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA and a public intellectual whose numerous books include co-edited volumes such as The Other Special Relationship: Race, Rights and Riots in Britain and the United States (2015); Walter Rodney, The Russian Revolution: A View From the Third World ( 2018); as well as monographs, Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (2012); Thelonious Monk (2009); and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2002)
Please join us for a talk titled “'Freedom is a Place': On War, Displacement, and Genocide in the 21st Century" by Professor Robin D. G. Kelley of UCLA. This event is part of the Bebe Koch Petrou Lecture Series and is co-sponsored by the Frederick Douglass Center for Leadership Through the Humanities.
Abstract:
Displacement is not an event but a condition that appears to define the current state of the world. Its source in every case is war, which has become the prevailing mode of governance. If Ruth Wilson Gilmore is right, that “freedom is a place,” than most of the world lives in a state of unfreedom, ruled by thanatocracy and a new form of fascism. I’m speaking of 123 million displaced people, 150 million homeless, dodging bombs and bulldozers in war zones, Black and Brown people living under a modern police state, native peoples all over the world still fighting 500 years of dispossession, and so forth. I will meditate on what this means by looking at several “theaters” of war—from policing in u.s. cities to Palestine, Sudan, Congo, Standing Rock; aggressive class war on working people and the poor; the fascist regime of mass deportation, the genocidal disappearance of trans people, the vicious, ableist and racist resurrection (and legitimation) of eugenics, and so on. If this is the world we’re struggling to transform, then what does it mean to create a place of freedom? What is home?
About the Speaker:
Robin D. G. Kelley is Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nahs Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA and a public intellectual whose numerous books include co-edited volumes such as The Other Special Relationship: Race, Rights and Riots in Britain and the United States (2015); Walter Rodney, The Russian Revolution: A View From the Third World ( 2018); as well as monographs, Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (2012); Thelonious Monk (2009); and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2002)
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