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Region and Enmity: A RaceB4Race Symposium

When:  Tuesday, October 19, 2021, 03:00pm

Where:  Online

Category:  Center for Cultural Analysis

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RaceB4Race event imageEnmity is a sustaining force for systemic racism, a fervent antipathy toward a category of people. Enmity exists at the nexus of individual and group identity and produces difference by desiring opposition and supremacy, imagining separation by force, and willing conflict. Enmity unfolds in different ways in different places, according to local logics of territory, population, language, or culture, even as these geographical divisions are subject to constant change.

This interdisciplinary symposium focuses on how premodern racial discourses are tied to cartographical markers and ambitions. The notions of enmity and region provide a dual dynamic lens for tracing the racial repertoires that developed in response to increasingly hostile contention between early modern cultural and political forces. The symposium will invite scholars to take up this intersection between region and enmity, and to examine how belief in difference, or the emergence of polarizing structures and violent practices, configured race thinking and racial practices in ways that are both unique to different territories and that transcend them.

RaceB4Race® is brought to life by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in partnership with The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Division of Humanities at Arizona State University. RaceB4Race is underwritten by the Hitz Foundation.

Learn more about RaceB4Race here.

Thank you to some of the specific partners at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Without their support, this symposium would not be possible:

  • The Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University, New Brunswick
  • The Department of English, Rutgers University - Newark
  • The Department of World Languages and Cultures, Rutgers University - Camden
  • The Department of History, Rutgers University - Newark
  • The Department of English, Rutgers University - New Brunswick

Invited Speakers

  • Yonatan Binyam (University of California, Los Angeles)
  • Allison Blakely (Boston University)
  • Ireri E. Chávez-Bárcenas (Bowdoin College)
  • Diego Luis (Davidson College)
  • Ruen-chuan Ma (Utah Valley University)
  • Bindu Malieckal (Saint Anselm College)
  • Kelly Nguyen (University of California, Berkeley)
  • Dan-el Padilla Peralta (Princeton University)
  • Kristina Richardson (Queens College CUNY)
  • Miguel A. Valerio (Washington University in St. Louis)
  • Cristi Whiskey (University of California, Los Angeles)
  • Shao-yun Yang (Denison University)

Keynote conversation: Shahzia Sikander

MacArthur Fellowship-winning visual artist Shahzia Sikander’s vibrant body of work in a range of media reveals an extraordinary relationship with the materials, images, and artistic traditions of the premodern world, and with the political, religious, and cultural tensions that connect that world to our own. Sikander builds a visual vocabulary to express the cross-cultural dialogue and hybrid forms of identity and expression that are always there, suppressed but present, across the centuries.

In conversation with Kishwar Rizvi, Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at Yale University, and the RaceB4Race Executive Board, Shahzia Sikander will discuss the interplay between the “traditional” techniques (such as Indo-Persian miniature painting) and the striking and at times incongruous imagery that enable her work to connect inexorably past and present. As the keynote conversation for the RaceB4Race Region and Enmity symposium, this event will ask questions about the “enmity” that intersects the racial and regional alliances of the conference theme. Sikander’s work makes clear that enmity is not only armed engagement or a mappable conflict zone, but is also an intimate and codependent relationship that is also always a struggle for dominance and control.

The recorded conversation will be available to watch on the ACMRS YouTube channel at 5:00 pm EDT on Tuesday, October 19, 2021. It will be available to watch for two weeks.

View works from Shahzia Sikander’s retrospective exhibit “Extraordinary Realities,” organized by the RISD Museum and recently on display at The Morgan Library.

Read Shahzia Sikander’s recent reflection, “What We Believe About Culture," in The New York Times The Big Ideas series.

RaceB4Race is free and open to the public. You will need to register for each session individually.

Coffee talks are primarily intended for early career researchers. They will have a maximum of 20 participants and will be first come first serve. In an effort to allow everyone who wants to participate a chance to get a spot, please only register for one coffee talk session.

On the day of the session(s) you registered for, you will receive an automated email from Eventbrite with the livestream link to the email you registered with. Please check your spam/junk folders.

More Information

Register for Region and Enmity: A RaceB4Race Symposium