Please join us for a lecture by Jodi Melamed
Tuesday, 12 March, 6:30pm
Segal Theatre

How can we explain the open secret of permissible violence for capitalist accumulation, in the U.S. and globally?  Jodi Melamed argues that we must come to grips with 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. In this talk, she examines administrative power rooted in rights. That is, Melamed examines how capitalist economies are constituted, operationalized, and administrated through differential rights. In particular, she looks at the administration of today’s financial, extractive, and logistical neoliberal capitalism through differential rights and identifies two racialized repertoires of rights powerfully at work in the present: the right of investor classes to be unencumbered by concern for the wellbeing of others, and assetless individuality as the right to be handled.

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 an editor of a recent volume of Social Text focused on “Economies of Dispossession.”  This lecture is drawn from her current book project, Dispossession by Administration. 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.

Brought to you by the American Studies Certificate Program and the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics

Free and open to the public.