Dr. Jodi Melamed "A World in Which Many Worlds Fit: Unrealizing Today's Colonial Racial Capitalist Logistic-ality"

Jodi Melamed is associate professor of English and Africana Studies at Marquette University. She is the author of  Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism  (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and has published many articles and chapters in a wide array of journals and editions. She is a co-editor of a recent volume of Social Text focused on “Economies of Dispossession.” Her current book project, Dispossession by Administration, investigates the diffuse and deadly capacities of administrative power to give impunity to racial capitalist violence through seemingly neutral repertoires of ‘democratic’, ‘procedural’, and ‘technical’ governance. Jodi Melamed is the recipient of numerous awards, fellowships, and grants, including a Fulbright, a Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellowship, and grants from the American Studies Association, the Social Science Research Council, the Mellon Foundation and the Wisconsin Humanities Council.

Dr. Melamed's talk titled "A World in Which Many Worlds Fit: Unrealizing Today's Colonial Racial Capitalist Logistic-ality" will exmaine the colonial and racial routines through which capitalism operationalizes space for authoritarian and/or multicultural neoblieralism tdoay. In particular, we will use "logistics" as a hermeneutic to highlight the abstracting, circulatory, processual, conforming, transactability-making dimensions of capitalist power (exorbitant to liberal understandings of political economy) as these funcion to convert material violence in a grounded location (extraction, disposseion, starvation) into capital and wealth. At the same time, we will examine hte making of grounded relationality, associated with contemporary Black radical uprisings, abolition-making, and landback movements, as the undoing of colonial racial capitalist geographies.