Thursday March 26th | 7–9pm | The James Gallery
Exhibition opening reception of How can I say this so that we can stay in this car together? featuring artists and members of The Racial Imaginary Institute.
Co-sponsored by The Center for the Humanities and the James Gallery in collaboration with the The Racial Imaginary Institute.
Friday, March 27th | 10am–5pm | Segal Theater
Symposium featuring presentations by Ajay Singh Chaudhary (Brooklyn Institute for Social Research), Abou Farman (New School for Social Research), Rebecca Karl (New York University), Nikhil Singh (New York University), Abdel Razzaq Takriti (University of Houston), and Elleni Centime Zeleke. Reception to follow.
These events will be live-streamed and recorded.
This event is co-sponsored by the James Gallery and the Center for Humanities.
Friday Schedule (TBC)
10:00am
Breakfast and opening remarks by Gary Wilder (The Graduate Center)
10:30–12pm: Session I
Ajay Singh Chaudhary, "The Long Now: Time, Climate, and Politics After the End of History"
Abou Farman, "TERMINALITY: Technoscientific Eschatology in The Future Perfect Tense"
1:30–3:00pm: Session II
Abdel Razzaq Takriti, "Histories and Futures of Anti-Colonial Liberation"
Elleni Centime Zeleke, "The Subjunctive Mood in the Ethiopian Revolution"
3:15–4:45pm | Session III
Rebecca Karl, "Revolutions and Futurity: Speaking of China"
Nikhil Singh, "Racial Capitalism and its Discontents"
Participant Bios
Ajay Singh Chaudhary is the executive director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and a core faculty member specializing in social and political theory. He holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics. His research focuses on social and political theory, Frankfurt School critical theory, political economy, political ecology, media, and post-colonial studies. He has written for the The Guardian, n+1, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Baffler, Quartz, Social Text, Dialectical Anthropology, The Hedgehog Review, Filmmaker Magazine, and 3quarksdaily, among other venues. Ajay is currently working on a book of political theory for the Anthropocene.
An anthropologist, writer and artist, Abou Farman is author of the book Clerks of the Passage (2012, Montreal: Linda Leith Press) and On Not Dying: Secular Immortality in the Age of Technoscience(2020, Minneapolis: Univ. Minn. Press). He is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research and founder of Art Space Sanctuary as well as the Shipibo Conibo Center of NY. As part of the artist duo caraballo-farman, he has exhibited internationally, including at the Tate Modern, UK, and PS1/MOMA, NY, and received several grants and awards, including NYFA and Guggenheim Fellowships. He is producer and co-writer on several feature films most recently Icaros: A Vision.
Rebecca E. Karl teaches history at New York University. Her recent publications include China's Revolutions in the Modern World: A Brief Interpretive History (Verso 2020) and Magic of Concepts: History and the Economic in Twentieth-Century China (Duke 2017). She is also the author, among others, of Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World: A Concise History (Duke 2010) and of Staging the World: Chinese Nationalist at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Duke 2002). She is a frequent translator from the Chinese of historical and contemporary texts, and a founding contributor to the "praxis" section of positionswebsite.org.
Nikhil Pal Singh is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University, founding Faculty Director of the NYU Prison Education Program and fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. A historian of the civil rights movement, foreign policy and national security in the 20th-century United States, his most recent book is Race and America’s Long War (University of California Press, 2017). He is also the author of Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2004), and author and editor (with Jack O’Dell) of Climin’ Jacob’s Ladder; The Black Freedom Movement Writing of Jack O’Dell. Singh’s essays and interviews have appeared in New York Magazine, N+1, The New Republic, The Intercept, Salvage, The New Statesman and The Boston Review.
Dr. Abdel Razzaq Takriti is Associate Professor, Arab-American Educational Foundation Chair in Modern Arab History, and Director of the Center for Arab Studies at the University of Houston. His research focuses on revolutions, anti-colonialism, global intellectual currents, and state formation in the modern Arab world. He is the author of Monsoon Revolution: Republicans, Sultans, and Empires in Oman, 1965-1976 and the co-author (with Karma Nabulsi) of The Palestinian Revolution website learnpalestine.politics.ox.ac.uk, which recently won the 2019 Middle East Studies Association of North America's Undergraduate Education Award.
Elleni Centime Zeleke received her Ph.D. from the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought at York University (Toronto) in 2016. Her research interests include student movements in the Horn of Africa, 20th-century state formation in Africa, as well as comparative social and political theory. Elleni’s first book is titled Ethiopia In Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production,1964-2016. The hardcover was published by the Historical-Materialism Book Series at Brill in the fall of 2019. A paperback version will also be published by Haymarket Books in the fall of 2020. Ethiopia In Theory asks: what does it mean to write today about the appropriation and indigenisation of Marxist and mainstream social science ideas in an Ethiopian and African context; and, importantly, what does the archive of revolutionary thought in Africa teach us about the practice of critical theory more generally?
