December « 2015 « Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Gender

James Haile: “Ta-Nehisi Coates: quantum matter and the phenomenology of the body” – October 20, 2015

The publication of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “letter to his son,” Between the World and Me (2015), has been met with mixed reviews. Responses have ranged from a critique for his ‘pessimism’ to grand celebratory remarks announcing him as the next great intellectual and social critic in the mold of James Baldwin. This talk will investigate the meaning of the body in Coates’ book and its relationship to ‘race’ and will argue that while Coates does not offer us a solution to the problem of embodiment or the galaxy distances between bodies, black and white, what he does offer, to his son and to his readers, […]

Dennis Dalton: “Gandhi and Forgiveness” – September 29, 2015

Gandhi practiced the value of forgiveness as a method of conflict resolution. He derived this idea from the world’s great religious traditions. He applied it to his leadership of the Indian independence movement and later to attaining peace in the face of Hindu-Muslim civil war. This lecture will explain how he urged forgiveness of British atrocities following the Amritsar massacre of 1919 and then through his Calcutta fast for religious unity in 1947. reference will also be made to similar acts of forgiveness by Martin Luther Kind, Jr. in 1956 during the Montgomery bus boycott.

Rhonda Sharpe: “I’m Every Woman”: Income Distribution by Race and Ethnicity – September 17, 2015

July 28, 2015 was Black Women’s Pay Equity day – the day that Black women’s earnings were equal to that of white men’s earnings in 2014. Much of the scholarly literature on pay inequality focuses on the inequities between white men and others. This study analyzes the wage gap between Black women and other women, controlling for age cohort, education, geographic location, and marital status/family type. In this talk, I will describe the study and explore its implications for economic policy and future research.

Ketaki Pant: “Homes of Capital: Merchants across Indian Ocean Gujarat” – November 10, 2015

Muslims of western South Asia were major merchants across the British-controlled Indian Ocean from Durban in South Africa to Rangoon in Burma. This talk focuses on the merchant homes, tangible sites of teak and brick that continue to exist today and offer an alternative archive to studying this history. Pant reflects on what colonial capitalism in the Indian Ocean looked like from the perspective of these intimate sites and considers the effective dimensions of mercantile subjectivity that produced the flexible persons central to the post-slavery era of indentured labor migration.

Coralyn Holmes: “White Men’s Guilt and Black Women’s Pain: Gender, Race, and Embodiment in South Africa’s Reconciliation Process” – November 3, 2015

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of South Africa was engineered to redress human rights violations perpetrated under apartheid rule. Yet, in many ways, the reconciliation process did not interrupt the patriarchal and racial orders that were established and maintained by the colonial and apartheid governments. This talk will examine the ways in which embodied race and gender identities have been reproduced in the post-apartheid era and effect the ways in which individual engage with the project of national reconciliation.

Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Gender

Archive for December, 2015

James Haile: “Ta-Nehisi Coates: quantum matter and the phenomenology of the body” – October 20, 2015

Dennis Dalton: “Gandhi and Forgiveness” – September 29, 2015

Rhonda Sharpe: “I’m Every Woman”: Income Distribution by Race and Ethnicity – September 17, 2015

Ketaki Pant: “Homes of Capital: Merchants across Indian Ocean Gujarat” – November 10, 2015

Coralyn Holmes: “White Men’s Guilt and Black Women’s Pain: Gender, Race, and Embodiment in South Africa’s Reconciliation Process” – November 3, 2015

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