This talk is drawn from Goldstein’s current book manuscript, The Colonial Present: Histories of Dispossession beyond Settlement. It considers the colonial-capitalist politics of water for Indigenous peoples and other racialized peoples during the present moment of climate catastrophe. The juridical production of water in the US Southwest as a “natural resource” to be quantified and managed, and […]

The Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry (CICI), which houses The Program in Critical Theory, is delighted to announce our inaugural symposium: Borders and Crossings: Contemporary Arts and Techniques of Migration. The event will take place March 10-11, 2023, at the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley. Borders are marked by fences and walls, but also by technologies, laws, […]

In a chapter entitled “Fanonian Futures,” David Scott points to the difference between the (Frantz) Fanon text that has resonated the most in the Northern Hemisphere — Black Skin, White Masks — and that which seemed most widely read in the South — The Wretched of the Earth, most especially “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness.” […]

The UC Berkeley Rhetoric 2022-23 Colloquium Series Presents: Fanon’s Psychoanalysis Open to all Berkeley students and faculty Add to Google calendar Of all the many aspects of the life and work of Frantz Fanon, his relation to psychoanalysis has remained amongst the most enigmatic and debated—repeatedly criticised or tidied up into more recognizable forms. In […]

“1902/2012” traces the emergence of Blackness as an ontological category in South Africa. It offers an analysis of early twentieth century Black writing in order to make claims about what Blackness came to mean at the dawn of the last century. Victoria Collis-Buthelezi is director of the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender, and Class at […]

Response by Mel Y. Chen, UC Berkeley In this talk I reconsider the “coloniality of gender” to explore some feminist mobilizations of bodies as territories in contemporary Latin America. I start by revisiting Latin American decolonial, non-binary approaches that highlight the coloniality of knowledge that informs medical and racist constructions of gender. Taking as a […]

Online Zoom event; Register here Join the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs for a virtual event in a series of interventions organized by the Critical South book series. The Scent of the Father: Essay on the Limits of Life and Science in Sub-Saharan Africa by Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, a conversation with Felwine Sarr (Duke University), Mamadou Diouf […]

Online Zoom event; Register here 10 AM PST / 8 PM SAST / 6 PM GMT Join the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs for a virtual event in a series of interventions organized by the Critical South book series. Undoing Apartheid, a conversation with the author Premesh Lalu (University of the Western Cape), Su-Ming Khoo (University […]

The Program in Critical Theory is an intellectual and scholarly collaboration between faculty and graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley. It supports efforts to secure the conditions under which that collaboration can continue to thrive.  Out of respect for, and in solidarity with, our graduate colleagues, the Program has postponed scheduled public events […]

Please note that the scheduled November 15 event with Robin Greeley, “Red Square Impossible Pink: Neoliberalism and Perception in the Art of Melanie Smith,” has been postponed until the spring 2023 semester.

This two-day symposium, hosted by the Association of Postcolonial Thought and the University of California-Berkeley, looks to bring together a diverse, interdisciplinary body of scholars and instigators to revive anticolonialism as theory.

This two-day symposium, hosted by the Association of Postcolonial Thought and the University of California-Berkeley, looks to bring together a diverse, interdisciplinary body of scholars and instigators to revive anticolonialism as theory.

This fall BAMPFA is honored to have Rithy Panh present two of his recent films in person. A survivor of the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal regime, Panh has devoted his career to telling the stories of the perpetrators and some two million victims who died in extermination prisons and labor camps in Cambodia between 1975 and […]

This fall BAMPFA is honored to have Rithy Panh present two of his recent films in person. A survivor of the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal regime, Panh has devoted his career to telling the stories of the perpetrators and some two million victims who died in extermination prisons and labor camps in Cambodia between 1975 and […]

In the Spice Islands, today’s Maluku (Indonesia), European trade stimulated a great boom in slave raiding. Many enslaved people were passed from Maluku elites to Europeans and shipped westward to work in plantations and mines as well as in personal service. Yet the meaning and practice of enslavement was contested in Maluku. This talk considers the emergence of the commodification of human beings within the interaction of Europeans, Maluku elites, and the “Papuan raiders” who procured most of the enslaved—as well as suffering enslavement themselves.