Lectures

This is the audio recording of Professor Judith Butler's public lecture at trinity College on Thursday February 5th, 2015: Vulnerability and Resistance Revisisted. 

Judith Butler - 'Vulnerability And Resistance Revisited'

A panel discussion with Judith Butler about her book "Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism" (Columbia University Press, 2012).

November 25, 2013
Baltimore, Maryland

Panelists:
Claire Katz, Texas A&M University
Samuel Brody, University of Cincinnati
Yaniv Feller, University of Toronto
Mark Lewis Taylor, Princeton Theological Seminary
Saba Mahmood, University of California, Berkeley
Martin Kavka, Lehigh University
Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley (Responding)
Rebecca Alpert, Temple University (Presiding)

(Audio File: 2 hours, 28 minutes)

Judith Butler's Parting Ways (Columbia University Press, 2012)

Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw - the academic who coined the term 'intersectionality' and co-founder of the African American Policy Forum - gives a keynote on the unique challenges facing women and girls of colour when it comes to the struggle for gender equality, racial justice and wellbeing.

WOW 2016 | Intersectionality: Kimberlé Crenshaw on race, gender, identity and activism




Judith Butler Lecture: Cultural Translations of Gender- 2016, California College of the Arts 

Judith Butler Lecture

Often defined as “presentism,” the regime of historicity of the beginning of the twenty-first century posits a kind of perpetual present, absorbing in itself both past and future. It corresponds with a neoliberal ethos that eternizes the current economic order and condemns any form of collective action. It avoids any critical elaboration of the past and promotes its reification (the “realms of memory”), neutralizing at the same time all its potentialities for a recollection oriented towards a political action in the present. Thus, in contrast with the two preceding centuries, which were shaped by the impact of the French and Russian Revolutions, the twenty-first century has begun under the sign of the eclipse of utopias. The disappearance of a visible “horizon of expectation” has generated a charged memory of the past century as a time of violence, totalitarianism and genocide, encapsulated by the image of their victims. The commemorations of May 8, 1945—the anniversary of the end of the Second World War and of the Sétif massacre in Algeria—are the mirror of three main spaces (entangled and not always geographically separated) that define the memory landscape of our global age: a Western space shaped by the remembrance of the Holocaust transformed into a “civil religion” of liberal democracy; an Eastern European space dominated by the legacy of Communism; and a postcolonial space exhuming imperial atrocities (from slavery to colonialism). The common feature of these mnemonic realms is their selective character that, focusing almost exclusively on victims, forgets the vanquished and rejects any idea of collective agency: antifascism, revolution, and anti-imperialism disappear from the history of the last two centuries. Between cultural industry and neoliberal Lebensführung, the legacy of past struggles becomes a kind of Marrano memory.

Enzo Traverso is a historian specializing in contemporary Europe with a focus on intellectual history of the twentieth century in a comparative perspective. He studied at the University of Genoa, Italy, and received his Ph.D. from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris (1989). He specializes in contemporary Europe, focusing on intellectual history of the twentieth century in a comparative perspective. Before coming to Cornell, he was a professor of political science at the University Jules Verne of Picardy, France, and a member of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). He has also been visiting professor at several European as well as Latin American Universities. His publications include The Origins of Nazi Violence (The New Press, 2003); Fire and Blood: The European Civil War (Verso, 2016); The End of Jewish Modernity: History of a Conservative Turn (Pluto Press, 2016); Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History and Memory (Columbia University Press, forthcoming 2016).

Presentism: The Politics of Memory in the Age of Neoliberalism | Enzo Traverso | 9/14/16

Mahmood Mamdani is Director of Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) at Makerere University in Uganda. He received his Ph.D. in government from Harvard University. Mamdani is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government in the Department of Anthropology and Political Science and the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, where he was also director of the Institute of African Studies from 1999 to 2004. He has taught at the University of Dar-es-Salaam (1973–1979), Makerere University (1980–1993), and University of Cape Town (1996–1999) and was the Founding Director of Centre for Basic Research in Kampala, Uganda (1987–1996). Mamdani is the author of Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Origins of Terror (Pantheon 2004); When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton 2001); Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton 1996); and ten other books. Mamdani was president of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) from 1999 to 2002.

Lectures

The Kenyanist by Kamau Wairuri |