Colonial Domesticity
“Colonial domesticity” is a way to express the centrality of forms of domesticity, such as family, kinship, and schooling, to the social reproduction of colonialism and racial capitalism. Colonial and capitalist social relations are materially reproduced through feminized care work, household, and embodied labor. While homes and households are primary sites for this invisible and often unwaged labor that reproduces human being, this reproduction also takes place in schools, factories, on assembly lines, in hospitals and prisons and in other institutions, at both intimate and global scales.Lisa Lowe is Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies at Yale University, and an affiliate faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration.
An interdisciplinary scholar whose work is concerned with the analysis of race, immigration, capitalism, and colonialism, she is the author of Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Cornell University Press, 1991), Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Duke UP, 1996), and The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke UP, 2015), and the co-editor of The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Duke UP, 1997). She is currently working on a book titled A Colonial History of the Present.
Keith Feldman, Discussant, Associate Professor and Chair, Comparative Ethnic Studies
Thursday, April 6, 5-7pm (add to Google calendar)
370 Dwinelle, Level G (In-person only event)
Open to all Berkeley students and faculty
Presented by the Department of Rhetoric and cosponsored by Asian American Research Center, the Center for Race and Gender, Critical Theory, Gender and Women’s Studies, and Geography.
Open to all Berkeley students and faculty
Presented by the Department of Rhetoric and cosponsored by Asian American Research Center, the Center for Race and Gender, Critical Theory, Gender and Women’s Studies, and Geography.