Administrating Hate, Circulating Violence: Re-making Solidarity
01.29.2025 | 12 - 1:30 PM | 691 Social Sciences Building (CRG Conference Room)
with Chandan Reddy (Associate Professor of Comparative History of Ideas, and Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle)
In the United States, liberal institutions from public health to policing to education swiftly admonished the “rise” in “anti-Asian hate incidences” that were recorded soon after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. While occluding the longue durée of settler/colonial violence structuring present-day Asian racial formations, the broad validity of an “anti-Asian hate” explanatory paradigm across U.S. society to understand public violence likewise omits any reckoning with the “ordinary” and “ongoing” violences necessary for racial capitalist world-making. This talk draws from an on-going collaborative project with co-author Jodi Melamed (Marquette University) titled Operationalizing Racial Capitalism: On Liberalism’s Command Powers in which we argue that the work of liberal political terms of order for colonial racial capitalism is to represent the violence that makes capital accumulation possible – war, systemic impoverishment, land grabs, confinement - as always socially good violence. Liberal political episteme and practices accomplish this by continually sorting between human beings fit for command and those who need to be commanded; between those fit for the “political,” the realm of hegemony and agency, and those consigned to the “administrative,” whose passivity and obedience are demanded “for their own good” or in the name of “the common good,” even to the point of killing. Situating the national discourse on “anti-Asian hate” as indexing the utility of “care discourses” for the administration of those to whom socially good violence can be done, I argue for the importance of solidarities that specifically undermine the killability that operationalizes colonial racial capitalism through the nation-state form.
AAVOT Forum Series is organized by Professors Susette S. Min (Dept. of Asian American Studies at UC Davis) and Leti Volpp (Berkeley Law/CRG).
Event hosted by CRG’s Anti-Asian Violence: Origins and Trajectories Research Initiative (AAVOT), and co-sponsored by the Asian American Research Center, and the Arts Research Center, and is generously funded by a UC Multicampus Research Program and Initiatives (UCMRPI) award.