California Roundtable for Philosophy & Race

Each year, the California Roundtable on Philosophy and Race convenes to advance the philosophical exploration of racial formations. This year’s Roundtable was hosted and sponsored by the Berkeley Department of Ethnic Studies and the Center for Race and Gender. The 2008 meeting counted eleven presenters coming from across the United States.

In her keynote talk, “Coloniality of Gender and the Colonial  Difference,”  Latina feminist philosopher Professor Maria Lugones reflected on the ways in which modern forms of colonization grounded on the “discovery” of the Americas produce “different” genders, including a category of non-gendered people who are not considered to be people.

Lugones links colonization, or rather, what she refers to as the “coloniality of power” (A. Quijano) and the “coloniality of gender,” to the animalization of sub-alterns, which includes specific ways of understanding their being, mores, and sexuality. She showed how this form of theorizing facilitates the understanding of contemporary struggles, and contributes to bridging the divides between those who advocate for decolonization and those who advocate for feminism.

This year’s topics included papers in political philosophy, aesthetics, critical race feminism, feminism and international law and violence, and analytic philosophy of race.  Some of the titles included “Long and Wide” South Asian Selves: Feminist Implications of Horizontal Cross-Racial Identification,” by Professor Shireen Roshanravan of Kansas State University’s Women’s Studies Department; “Feminism, International Law, and the Spectacular Violence of the ‘Other’: Decolonizing the Laws of War,” by Professor Liz Philipose of the Women’s Studies Department at CSU Long Beach, and “John Locke, Mary Rowlandson, and the Ontological Transformation of Space,” by Professor Darrell Moore of DePaul University’s Philosophy Department.

The Roundtable, which seeks to foster a productive and intellectually stimulating environment for those working in philosophy and race, also aspires to bring together scholars of color, and junior and senior scholars to develop and enhance constructive mentoring relationships. Next year’s Roundtable will leave California for the first time since its inception in 2004, to be held at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA on Oct. 2-3, 2009. The keynote speaker will be Professor Charles Mills, author of The Racial Contract, and John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy at Northwestern University. Full details for next year’s meetings program can be found online at www.caroundtable.org.