A lecture by Jodi A. Byrd

Thursday, 4 Oct, 6p, Skylight Room

Reading closely teamcherry’s videogame Hollow Knight through work by Kamau Brathwaite, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Édouard Glissant, this talk will discuss how antiblackness, theft of land, and the ontological turn to objects within technology and software studies are part of settler colonial proceduralisms. How do race and indigeneity function as recursion within the databases, code, and play structuring videogames? How might the nonhuman disrupt the normative structures of settler colonialism? And finally, what could grounded modes of relationality mean as resistance to such technological economies of dispossession?

Jodi A. Byrd is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and an Associate Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she is also a faculty affiliate at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Her work has been published in journals including American Indian Quarterly, Cultural Studies Review, Interventions, College Literature, J19, American Quarterly, Settler Colonial Studies, and Wíčazo Ša Review. Her book, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minnesota, 2011) won the 2013 Native American and Indigenous Studies Association Award for best first book. Her next project, Indigenomicon: American Indians, Videogames, and the Structures of Genre, delves into the literary and digital realms of play to think further about how the colonization of American Indians continues to inform imaginary terrains.

 

Sponsored by the American Studies Certificate Program, in conjunction with the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and the PhD Program in English
This event is free and open to the public.