This project comprises a working group that gathers faculty and graduate students across the disciplines to read recent scholarship on national and international theories of race and justice, and a colloquium featuring the work of key scholars in the fields of law, literature, and critical race studies. Through these channels the project will examine the relation between national and transnational legal institutions, philosophical explorations of law and justice, and analyses of economic, political, and cultural systems of violence and redress, focusing on the emergence of critical race studies in these contexts.

May 5, 2006
Petersen Room, Allen Library

Stephen Best
English, UC Berkeley
“The African Queen” 10:30 am

Saidiya Hartman
English, UC Berkeley
“The Dead Book” 1:30 pm

Roundtable Discussion 3:30 pm
Moderator: Gillian Harkins, English, UW

Participants:

Stephen Best
Stephen Best is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Together with Saidiya Hartman he has for the past several years served as co-organizer of the Redress Project. He is the author of The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (2004) and is currently at work on a study of rumor, promiscuous speech, and the slave’s archive.

Saidiya Hartman
Saidiya Hartman specializes in feminism, critical race theory, and African American literature and culture. She is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (1997) and the forthcoming Lose Your Mother: Memory and the Afterlife of Slavery. Her work has appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Callaloo, Between Woman and Nation: Nationalism, Transnational Feminisms and the State (1999) and Lorna Simpson: For the Sake of the Viewer (1992).

Stephanie Camp, History, UW
Chandan Reddy, English, UW