The Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College is pleased to invite you to a conversation with Jodi Melamed and Chandan Reddy. They will discuss their collaborative work on “command power,” their descriptive term for how liberalism functions as a racial capitalist world-making praxis, rather than as a philosophy of freedom or just order. Andy Hines will moderate the conversation.
The event will be held on Friday, April 5 at 4:30pm ET in the IC Dome at Swarthmore. It is open to all in the Tri-Co community and to the public.
The event is part of the Aydelotte Foundation’s project on “Race, Racism, and the Liberal Arts.” This project assembles work on underrepresented histories of how people, institutions, and ideas have existed outside of, pushed against, or reshaped from within the ideas and institutions of the liberal arts. It also investigates and recounts curricular, epistemological, and institutional genealogies that challenge how or whether the term liberal arts has silenced histories and ways of knowing developed by Black people, indigenous people, and people of color.
More information about the featured speakers can be found below. Please visit our website for updates on this research initiative, including additional events and publications.
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Jodi Melamed is professor of English and Race, Ethnic, and Indigenous Studies at Marquette University. For spring semester 2024 she will serve as the Norman Freehling Professor at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minnesota UP, 2011), co-editor of Economies of Dispossession: Indigeneity, Race, Capitalism (with Jodi A. Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, and Chandan Reddy), a special issue of the journal Social Text. Her influential essay, “Racial Capitalism,” is among the most cited articles in the journal Critical Ethnic Studies. Her current book project, Operationalizing Racial Capitalism: On Liberalism’s Command Powers (with Chandan Reddy) is under contract with Verso Books.
Chandan Reddy is Associate Professor in the departments of the Comparative History of Ideas and the Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. His book, Freedom With Violence: Race, Sexuality and the U.S. State (2011) from Duke University Press won the Alan Bray Memorial award for Queer studies from the MLA as well as the Best Book in Cultural Studies from the Asian American Studies Association, both in 2013. He is co-editor (with Jodi Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, and Jodi Melamed) of the special issue, “"Economies of Dispossession: Indigeneity, Race, Capitalism," Social Text (Spring 2018). His current book project, Operationalizing Racial Capitalism: On Liberalism’s Command Powers (with Jodi Melamed) is under contract with Verso Books.
Andy Hines is Senior Associate Director of the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College. He is the author of Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University (Chicago, 2022) and the editor of University Keywords (under contract, Hopkins).