Race and the Middle East/North Africa Mellon Sawyer Seminar: Race and Empire with Ann Stoler

Distinguished Professor Ann Stoler reflects on her intellectual trajectory in conversation with Professors Marie Brown and John Collins. The conversation will be moderated by Professor Mandana Limbert

The Race and the Middle East/North Africa Mellon Sawyer Seminar at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, is excited to inaugurate the academic year with a discussion with Ann Stoler (New School) of her seminal works, among them Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (1995), Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (2010), and Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (2016) with Professors Marie Brown (University of Kansas) and John Collins (Queens College and the Graduate Center). Registration via Zoom is required. Please click here to register.

09-10-2021 (Friday) at 1:00 PM (EDT)

Ann Stoler is Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research. Stoler is the director of the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry.  She taught at the University of Michigan from 1989-2003 and has been at the New School for Social Research since 2004, where she was the founding chair of its revitalized Anthropology Department. She is also one of the founding co-editors of the journal Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon. Her books include Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt, 1870–1979 (1985; 1995) Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (1995), Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (2002, 2010), Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (2009) and Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (2016). Her next book Interior Frontiers: the (sub)metrics of inequality is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.

Marie Grace Brown is a cultural historian of the Modern Middle East at the University of Kansas with a special interest in questions of gender, empire, and the body as historical text. Her award-winning book, Khartoum at Night: Fashion and Body Politics in Imperial Sudan, traces gestures, intimacies, and adornment to give a history of northern Sudanese women’s lives under imperial rule. Her current project explores the intimate lives of British administrators in Sudan and argues for an alternate imperial geography in which sentimental attachments defined the contours of empire.

John Collins is Professor of Anthropology at Queens College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the author of Revolt of the Saints: Memory and Redemption in the Twilight of Brazilian Racial Democracy, an ethnography of urban “restoration,” national histories, and racial politics in Brazil. He is also co-editor of Ethnographies of U.S. Empire. His current project examines human-animal relations and the politics of property and nature in New Jersey.

Mandana Limbert is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Queens College and the Graduate Center, the City University of New York. She is the author of  In the Time of Oil: Piety, Memory, and Social Life in an Omani Town and co-editor of Timely Assets: politics of resources and their Temporalities as well as the forthcoming Lifeworlds of Middle Eastern Oil. Her current project examines changing notions of Arabness over the course of the twentieth century Indian Ocean.

Zoom registration here: https://gc-cuny-edu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYtce2srD8oG9Z8vOLZGOBgF5Oc3ZV3M0zn 

Facebook event here: https://fb.me/e/1Lf2ekQEQ

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This event is co-sponsored by the PhD Program in Anthropology, PhD Program in History, and MA Program in Middle Eastern Studies.