Foundational Violence: Settler Colonial Articulations

A one-day symposium examining the production of settler colonialism as a foundational paradigm for racialization, labor, gender, sexuality, and citizenship. Speakers will consider how settler colonialism intersects with other logics of domination, and identify points of theoretical contestation and possibility.

Monday, April 13, 2015, 11 am – 5pm

Multicultural Community Center, Hearst Field Annex, D37
University of California, Berkeley
(location is wheelchair accessible)

11:00 am Opening Invocation: Corrina Gould, Chochenyo/Karkin Ohlone
Welcome: Evelyn Nakano Glenn, CRG Director

11:30 am-1:30 pm Indigeneity and Racial Regimes

Ben V. Olguín, University of Texas San Antonio
“Violentologies: Settler Colonialism, Latina/o-Indian Encounters, and the Violent Syntheses of Ambivalent LatinIndia/o Ontologies”

Candace Fujikane, University of Hawai’i, Manoa
Rearticulating “Race Across Occupation and Settler Colonialism: The Possibilities of Decolonial Multiethnic Nation-Building on the Kulāiwi, Native Ancestral Lands”

Andrea Smith, University of California Riverside
“Land as Settler Colonialism”

Discussant: Daniel Perlstein, University of California, Berkeley

1:30 pm-3:00 pm Lunch : Movie Performance

Joanne Barker, San Francisco State University
“Debt, Shame, and Indigeneity in an Imperialist Time”

Mishuana Goeman, University of California, Los Angeles
“Electric Lights, Tourist Sights: Gendering Dispossession and Colonial Infrastructure at the Niagara Falls Border”

Mark Rifkin, University of North Carolina Greensboro
“Ghost Dancing at Century’s End”

Discussant: Karl Britto, Comparative Literature, UCB

Speaker and Moderator Biographies

Joanne Barkeris Lenape (an enrolled member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians). She is Professor of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University. She is author of Native Acts: Law Recognition, and Cultural Authenticity and editor of Sovereignty Matters. She has published articles in several peer reviewed journals, received fellowships from the University of California, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. She is currently editing a volume of original essays entitled Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. It is under contract with Duke University Press and is in the final stages of revision. She has been serving as a consultant on the documentary short, Beyond Recognition, which debuted on PBS affiliate KRCB in November 2014 and was rebroadcast in March 2015 in honor of Women’s History Month.

Karl Brittois Associate Professor in the Departments of French and Comparative Literature at Berkeley. He specializes in francophone literary and cultural studies, with a particular research focus on French Indochina. He has published on Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic authors writing in French and English, colonial soldiers and Hollywood zombie films, and is a contributor to Public Books (www.publicbooks.org). He is a recipient of Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award, and has served as the Faculty Director of the Mellon/Townsend Center Discovery Fellows Program since 2012.

Candace Fujikane is Associate Professor of English at the University of Hawai‘i. She is co-editor with Jonathan Okamura of Whose Vision? Asian Settler Colonialism in Hawai‘i, a special issue of UCLA’s Amerasia Journal (2000), and Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai‘i (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008). “Mapping Wonder in the Māui Moʻolelo: Growing Aloha ʻĀina through Indigenous and Affinity Activism” is forthcoming in Rooted in Wonder: Tales of Indigenous Activism and Community Organizing. She is currently working on her book manuscript, Maps of Evidence: Indigenous and Critical Settler Cartography.

Mishuana Goeman, Tonawanda Band of Seneca, is an Associate Professor and Vice Chair of Gender Studies Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received her doctorate from Stanford University’s Modern Thought and Literature and was a UC Presidential Post-doctoral fellow at Berkeley. Her book, Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) was honored at the American Association for Geographic Perspectives on Women. She has published in peer reviewed journals such as Settler Colonial Studies, American Quarterly, Wicazo Sa, International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies, American Indian Cultures and Research Journal, and Journal of Anthropological Research. Currently she is part of a grant on Mapping Indigenous L.A. that is working toward creating a community oriented mobile application that decolonizes the LA landscape.

B. V. Olguín received his Ph.D. from Stanford University, and has taught as an assistant professor in the English Department at Cornell University, visiting scholar at the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and currently is an associate professor in the English Department and assistant director of the Honors College at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Red Leather Gloves (2014), and At the Risk of Seeming Ridiculous: Poems from Cuba Libre (2014); author of La Pinta: Chicana/o Prisoner Literature, Culture, and Politics (2010); co-editor of U.S. Latina/os and WWII: Mobility, Agency, and Ideology (2014); co-translator of Cantos de Adolescencia/Songs of Youth, by Américo Paredes (1932-1937) (2007); and co-editor of Altermundos: Recovering and Reassessing the Latina/o Speculative Arts (in progress). Olguín is completing a new manuscript for Oxford University Press, Violentologies: Warfare and Ontology in Latina/o War Literature, Film, and Popular Culture, 1835-2012.

Daniel Perlstein is an associate professor and historian at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education. Much of his work focuses on racial politics and public schools. He has also written on such topics as gender and school violence, progressive pedagogy, and education in the African American freedom struggle. Current research includes studies of education and the Harlem Renaissance and the role of imperialism in the work of John Dewey and other progressive educators.

Mark Rifkin is Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is the author of four books, including When Did Indians Become Straight?: Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty (winner of the John Hope Franklin prize for best book in American Studies) and, most recently, Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance. He also co-edited “Sexuality, Nationality, Indigeneity,” which won the prize for best special issue from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. He currently is serving as president of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association.

Andrea Smith is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies and Media and Cultural Studies at UC Riverside. She received her Ph.D. in History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz and has taught in the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan. Her publications include: Native Americans and the Christian Right: The Gendered Politics of Unlikely Alliances and Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide. She is also the editor of The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Nonprofit Industrial Complex, and co-editor of The Color of Violence, The Incite! Anthology. She currently serves as the U.S. Coordinator for the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians, and she is a co-founder of Incite! Women of Color Against Violence. She recently completed a report for the United Nations on Indigenous Peoples and Boarding Schools.

Lunchtime Film and Performances:

Hossein Ayazi, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management
Alisa Bierria, Center for Race Gender
Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Center for Race Gender
Katie Keliiaa, Comparative Ethnic Studies
Rachel Lim, Comparative Ethnic Studies
Bayley Marquez, Social and Cultural Studies, Graduate School of Education
Pam Matsuoka, Center for Race Gender
John Mundell, African American Studies