On the Seminar
The Sawyer Seminar, “Racial Disposability and Cultures of Resistance,“ is a project of Penn State’s Department of African American Studies, the College of the Liberal Arts, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
“Racial Disposability and Cultures of Resistance” focuses on regimes and relations of disposability and resistance in various sites, including Brazil, Nicaragua, Cuba, Mexico and the United States, from the 18th century forward. Racial disposability names a bundle of practices, institutions, and laws that demographically distributes and neglects civil rights, concentrating the use of force and threat of incarceration on particular communities with limited recourse to investigation and remedy. Similarly, our approach holds a range of institutions within the analytic frame of racial disposability to probe the functional connections between them. For instance, what is the relationship between the denial of public resources (education, clean water, etc.) to predominantly Black populations in some urban centers and the extraction of personal resources from other Black, urban populations through overpolicing practices that generate fines, compound debt, and wage garnishment? Disposability draws attention to the dual condition of value extraction and abandonment. The seminar equally attends to discarded citizens and non-citizens who are marked in ways that heighten vulnerability to violence with impunity—while situating these practices within the longue durée of racial terror and slavery throughout the Americas. African Diasporic Studies provides an analysis that questions the contours of the nation-state frame while producing alternatives. This Sawyer Seminar not only raises the question of whose lives count and to whom, as the Movement for Black Lives suggests, but also when and how particular lives count, and for how long and to what political ends.
Though these processes are produced, funded, and perpetuated at the level of state and corporate practices and policies, racially disposable populations never simply acquiesce. Be they Afro-Brazilian, Afro-Nicaraguan, or African-American, they respond in ways that are unpredictable—through real-time cell phone recordings, for instance—challenging the cultural logic, daily structures, and entrenched practices that reduce Black populations to targets for temporary use or permanent extermination. Those whose lives, bodies, and communities have historically been defined as disposable resist this characterization and its social effects through a variety of cultural and political strategies. Black communities, particularly youth, artists, and activists, have produced a rich repertoire of aesthetic practices, popular cultural movements, and activist traditions that refute the normalizing logic of racial disposability by asserting the creativity and resilience of Black life. This seminar takes seriously the multiple ways that marginalized racial subjects creatively, politically, and intellectually disrupt the logic of disposability with practices of organized resistance and an everyday politics of refusal.
Seminar Sponsors:
-
Penn State Department of African American Studies
-
Penn State College of the Liberal Arts
-
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Seminar News:
March 2019
-
Call for papers announced for Sawyer Seminar Culminating Conference.
February 2019
-
Noted scholar on the African diaspora to visit Penn State on Feb. 21
January 2019
-
Herman Bennett, Sawyer Seminar Speaker scheduled for February 2019, featured in How to Increase Graduate-School Diversity the Right Way
-
Lisa Cacho to speak at Penn State on Jan. 31
December 2018
-
Herman Bennett, Sawyer guest speaker scheduled for February 2019, receives praise for newly released book, African Slaves and Black Kings.
November 2018
-
AntiBlackness and the Brazilian Elections, co-authored by João Costa Vargas, Sawyer Seminar guest scheduled for April 2019.
October 2018
-
The Denial of Antiblackness: Multiracial Redemption and Black Suffering by João Costa Vargas, Sawyer Seminar guest scheduled for April 2019, featured in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
-
Michele Reid-Vazquez next speaker in Sawyer Seminar Series
-
Distinguished Latin American scholar to visit Penn State
September 2018
-
Deborah Thomas’s Tivoli Gardens
-
Sawyer Seminar Series to host free screening of ‘Four Days in May’ on Sept. 19
August 2018
-
UVA presents talk by James Forman Jr. at The Paramount Theater
-
Documentary Celebrates Career of Braddock-based Filmmaker Tony Buba
-
Tony Buba: “Braddock, PA,” a Brisk, Remedial Documentary of a Rust Belt Town
July 2018
-
Ellen Welcker reads “Children Listen” by Roger Reeves
June 2018
-
Junaid Rana and Sohail Daulatzai On Islam, White Supremacy, And The Myth Of The Empire Of Liberty
May 2018
-
Marcus Rediker’s connection to Benjamin Lay: The Quaker abolitionist disowned by his faith for condemning slave owners
-
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: Today’s Activists Should ‘Dream Bigger’ Than Predecessors, Professor Argues
April 2018
-
Sawyer Seminar Speaker Jelani Cobb honored as a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary finalist
-
Sawyer Seminar Speaker and newly named Pulitzer Prize winner James Forman Jr. on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah – “Locking Up Our Own” and the Path to Criminal Justice Reform – Extended Interview
-
Sawyer Seminar Speaker James Forman wins Pulitzer Prize in General Non-Fiction for “Locking Up Our Own”
March 2018
-
PSU Underground In Photos: Playing While White – David J. Leonard
-
David Leonard on “Playing While White”: the intersection of race and athletics in America
-
Sawyer Seminar Series brings David J. Leonard to campus March 26
-
PSU Underground In Photos: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor Lecture
-
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor to visit Penn State as part of Sawyer Seminar Series
-
Cynthia Young, Penn State colleagues are fostering a series of timely conversations on race and more
February 2018
-
Roger Reeves and Yogita Goyal examine slavery’s contemporary implications
-
Yogita Goyal: No Strangers Here
-
Roger Reeves, Yogita Goyal to visit Penn State on Feb. 22
-
“Ghosts of Amistad” screening sparks conversation about slavery
-
Take Note: James Forman Jr. On African Americans’ Role In Mass Incarceration
January 2018
-
Free screening of ‘Ghosts of Amistad’ to take place Feb. 8
-
James Forman Jr. contextualizes and criticizes mass incarceration
-
Noted author, law professor James Forman Jr. to speak at Penn State on Jan. 31
December 2017
-
Take Note: Jelani Cobb on Politics, Race and Writing (Interview)
November 2017:
-
‘Race is formative in American society’: Journalist Jelani Cobb speaks about race relations in America during the Trump era
October 2017:
Meet the Presenters:
November 13: Jelani Cobb
January 31: James Forman
February 8: Marcus Rediker and Tony Buba
February 14: Jessica Luther
February 22: Roger Reeves and Yogita Goyal
March 15: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
March 26: David J. Leonard
April 17: Junaid Rana
September 19: Deborah Thomas
October 4: G. Reid Andrews
October 22: Michele Reid-Vazquez
February 11: Maryam Kashani
February 21: Herman Bennett
March 21: Christopher Loperena
April 3: Brittney Cooper
April 17: João Costa Vargas
Featured image credit: Courtney Desiree Morris. “Crossing,” Soil. (courtneydesireemorris.com)
To opt-in to our Sawyer Seminar Series listserv, send an email to: PSUAFAM-SAWYER-subscribe-request@lists.psu.edu. No subject or message text is required.