Global Racisms and the Imagination of Just Futures A Mini-Course in Four Parts.

Outros
Seg . 29 Jun . 10h00 a Ter . 30 Jun . 17h00
Sala Maria de Sousa - ICS-ULisboa
Global Racisms and the Imagination of Just Futures A Mini-Course in Four Parts.
Anupama Rao - Columbia University & ICS Advanced Studies Fellow.
Organização: 
Research Group IMPÉRIOS and ERA-Chair IMAGINE

Global Racisms and the Imagination of Just Futures. A Mini-Course in Four Parts, by Anupama Rao, Columbia University & ICS Advanced Studies Fellow.

Dates: 29-30 June 2026

Schedule: 10:00–12:30 a.m. / 2:00–4:30 p.m.

Venue: ICS-ULisboa, Maria de Sousa Room

Organisation: Research Group IMPÉRIOS and ERA-Chair IMAGINE

Enrollment/attendance details:

Students that enroll and attend the mini-course Global Racisms and the Imagination of Just Futures - A Mini-Course and the conference by Professor Anupama Rao, Archives and Imagination: Thinking Across Comparison, Connection, and Solidarity (25th June, 3 p.m.) will qualify for 1 academic credit (ECTS-equivalent).

Mini-course & Conference registration (open until June 19; no fee) here

Attendance: In-person presence is expected for credited participation.

Credit: 1 ECTS-equivalent upon verified attendance.

Readings available to registered participants

This course explores the impact of the Luso-Hispanic moment in shaping identities, practices of social distinction, histories of merchant and commercial capitalism, and practices of aesthetic production and performance whose traces are visible into the present. By adopting an expansive focus on philosophies of difference as a frame, the seminar considers the constitutive contradiction between race/racism, on the one hand, and ideas of “the human” on the other in shaping global thought and imperial governance. How might a focus on global racisms excavate ideas of historical comparison and social solidarity? How have political utopias and forms of subaltern internationalism challenged histories of imperial unfreedom and social inequality? What is the relationship between experiences of historical injustice and acts of archival redress and repair? Throughout we will focus on discussions about how we know what we know by addressing changing ideas of the archive as repository.
 
Details:
The course consists of four sessions of approximately 2:30 hours/session across two days on June 29 and 30, 2026.
Participants will engage with readings, online interviews, exploration of artwork, and digital archives. We will work across contemporary, modern and early modern periods, as well as geopolitical boundaries such as the global North versus the global South.
 
Program:
Session One, Genealogies of Difference explores raza and casta as important templates for the global organization of personhood across the early modern and modern periods, with a focus on understanding how these categories have been understood, deployed, and transformed over time.

Session Two, Geographies of Injustice explores the conceptual potential and the limits of concepts such as settler colonialism, racial capitalism, apartheid, the slum, the ghetto andother socio-spatial terms that conjugate categories of social difference (gender, region, religion, caste, race, or class) with spatial logics.

Session Three, Utopia and Internationalism - with the participation of Inês Pontes, ICS AHS (Social History Archive) addresses social movements and aesthetic initiatives, e.g., the Afro-Asian Congresses, Bandung, the Dalit Panthers, Muslim Marxisms, and other Third World formations. Material from the Arquivo de História Social on Portugese social history will form an important local archive for consideration. This session will have the collaboration of Inês Ponte, Director of the Arquivo de História Social.

Session Four, Repair, Redress, and Public Memory engages methods and practices of “making and doing,” focused on infrastructures of public memory and acts of “critical fabulation” (Saidiya Hartman), e.g., digital archives, oral history, performance, counter-historical monuments, visual essays, and podcasts which address complex histories of identity formation, struggle, and resistance.

Bionote:
Anupama Rao is Professor of History and Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at the Barnard College, Columbia University, Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society and the convenor of the Ambedkar Initiative. She was the Principal Investigator for the Global Humanities Institute-CHCI (Mellon) grant, “Global Racisms, Cold War Humanism, and Just Futures” and is the co-director of the project, “Geographies of Injustice,” hosted by Columbia’s Center for the Study of Social Difference. She is also working in a project titled Dalit Bombay, which explores the relationship between caste, political culture, and everyday life in colonial and postcolonial Bombay.

Professor Rao has written widely on the themes of colonialismo and post-colonial societies, comparative urbanism; and colonial genealogies of human rights and humanitarianism, and on non-Western histories of gender and sexuality. Her book, The Caste Question (2009) theorized caste subalternity, with specific focus on the role of anti-caste thought (and its thinkers) in producing alternative genealogies of political subject-formation. Recent publications include The Many Worlds of R. B. More: Memoir of a Dalit Communist with Wandana Sonalkar (Leftword, 2019), and the edited volume Gender, Caste, and the Imagination of Equality (Women Unlimited, 2017). She is completing Ambedkar in America: Reading Castes in India, and coediting The Cambridge Companion to Ambedkar (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) with Shailaja Paik. 

  • Programa Global Racisms
Impérios, Colonialismo e Sociedades Pós-coloniais