2023 Zora Neal Hurston Lecture
Wednesday March 8, 2023 at 6:00pm-8pm
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences and American Studies
Director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics-The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Discussant: Shanya Cordis
Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies ; Center for Ethnicity & Race (CSER)- Columbia University
Location
Columbia University Faculty House
Presidential Ballroom 3rd floor
64 Morningside Drive
NY, NY 10027
Registration required http://bit.ly/3lqzKSV
Dr. Ruth Wilson Gilmore will deliver the 2023 Zora Neale Hurston Lecture. Hurston started her career as an anthropologist as a doctoral student at Columbia University. Her skills as an ethnographer during the Harlem Renaissance attended to people and culture in a way that captured the rich daily experiences of African-American life in the South and in the Caribbean. Her literary contributions have greatly changed the landscape in American literature and African-American literature through her characterizations of class disparities in Black working poor and rural communities. Prof. Gilmore’s scholarship and activism exemplifies the intellectual fierceness and talent of Sister Zora.
**Speaker Bios**
Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences, and American Studies, and director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Dr. Gilmore’s scholarly accomplishments are many. She is author of the prize-winning Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (UC Press), Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition (Haymarket); and most recently Abolition Geography (Verso). Recent publications include a foreword to Bobby M. Wilson’s Birmingham classic America’s Johannesburg (U Georgia Press), a foreword to Cedric J. Robinson on Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance, and a collection of Stuart Hall's writing on race and difference (co-edited with Paul Gilroy, Duke UP). She also serves on the Executive Committee of the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean. Dr. Gilmore is co-founder of many grassroots organizations including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network.
Shanya Cordis is a first-generation Black and indigenous (Lokono and Warau) Guyanese-American. As a sociocultural anthropologist, her research focuses on indigeneity across the Americas and the Caribbean, Black and Indigenous political subjectivities and resistance, transnational black and indigenous feminisms, and critical feminist geographies. Her manuscript,Unsettling Geographies: Antiblackness, Gendered Violence, and Indigenous Dispossession in Guyana, is a critical feminist ethnography that tracks how geographies of racial difference undergird indigenous recognition policies, extractive economies, and neocolonial capitalism, advancing the annexation of indigenous territories and entrenching antiblack logics. Secondly, Unsettling Geographies introduces relational difference, a theoretical framework which captures the social and political entanglements of the afterlives of slavery, conquest, and indentureship and its constitutively gendered and sexualized nature. Through an intersectional analysis of the racial and sexual imaginaries of the body—namely African, Amerindian, and Indian women— this book also traces how gendered violence is relationally configured and central to colonial capitalist expansion disrupting narratives that depict structural forces of dispossession as merely postcolonial remnants or nationalistic struggles.
In addition to her research, Dr. Cordis is deeply invested in cultivating collaborative Black and Indigenous feminist praxis, both in and out of the classroom, to generate more expansive visions of black and indigenous liberation and autonomy. Critical Black and Indigenous feminisms offer a vital way to analyze movement(s) toward more transformative and decolonial futures, emphasizing how multiple axis of power—heteropatriarchy, racism, capitalism, and colonialism — work together to structure our societies. As part of imagining and co-creating other ways of being in the world, she explores and incorporates poetry and other performative arts into her scholarship and pedagogy. As part of her teaching practice, she aims to incorporate teaching methods that cohere theory and praxis and bring the insights of interdisciplinary anthropological research to students’ embodied lived experience. The classroom, beyond being a site of institutional socialization, is as a space for liberatory transformation, challenging students to not only be cognizant of why social inequities persist, but also to imagine and create pathways toward addressing them in their respective avenues of study/interest.
Presented in co-sponsorship: Institute for Research in African-American Studies- Columbia University (IRAAS); African American & African Diaspora Studies Department- Columbia University (AAADS)
Semester Event Partners: Center for Ethnicity and Race-Columbia University (CSER), Institute for the Study of Sexuality & Gender -Columbia University (ISSG); Institute for Comparative Literature & Society (ICLS); Department of Art History & Archaeology-Columbia University ; Department of Anthropology ; Department of Africana Studies- Barnard College; The School of the Arts - Columbia University; Center for Jazz Studies-Columbia University
