CANCELLED : The Labour of Forgetting: On the Politics of Disregard
Monday, 20 May 2019, 6:30 – 8pm 
Due to unforeseen circumstances we have had to cancel this lecture.
A lecture by Prof Ann Laura Stoler (The New School for Social Research, New York) as part of the 'Out of the Ashes' lecture series.
Register here
While imperial power has often been analyzed as a panoptic, surveilling gaze, in Along the Archival Grain (Princeton, 2009) Prof Stoler extols us to consider instead the 'politics of disregard', that is to say the 'acts of ignoring rather than ignorance' that 'circumscribe what one can know' under empire.
In this talk Prof Stoler takes up this task by casting a more careful regard on the histories, archives, artworks, and events that have been persistently and systematically occluded or ignored under dominant scopic, political, linguistic, or mediatic regimes. Part of her latest project, Vital Lies, Prof Stoler seeks to tarry with, rather than elide or dismiss, the processes and products of active unseeing and self-deception that condition the reproduction of the everyday – the 'vital lies' and secular mythologies at the core of imperial dispositions.
About Ann Laura Stoler
Ann Laura Stoler is Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research. Stoler is the director of the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry. She taught at the University of Michigan from 1989-2003 and has been at the New School for Social Research since 2004, where she was the founding chair of its revitalized Anthropology Department. She has worked for some thirty years on the politics of knowledge, colonial governance, racial epistemologies, the sexual politics of empire, and ethnography of the archives. She has been a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études, the École Normale Supérieure and Paris 8, Cornell University’s School of Criticism and Theory, Birzeit University in Ramallah, the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism, Irvine’s School of Arts and Literature, and the Bard Prison Initiative. She is the recipient of NEH, Guggenheim, NSF, SSRC, and Fulbright awards, among others. Recent interviews with her are available at Savage Minds, Le Monde, and Public Culture, as well as Pacifica Radio and here.
Her books include Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt, 1870–1979 (1985; 1995), Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (1995), Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (2002, 2010), Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (2009) and the edited volumes Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (with Frederick Cooper, 1997), Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (2006), Imperial Formations (with Carole McGranahan and Peter Perdue, (2007) and Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination (2013). Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Her commitment to joining conceptual and historical research has lead to collaborative work with historians, literary scholars and philosophers, and most recently in the creation of the journal Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon, of which she is one of the founding editors.
Professor Stoler is the Founding Director of the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry (ICSI)
About the the series
Creating, destroying and recovering human knowledge and cultural heritage—these are themes with enormous contemporary resonance. They are also processes with a deep history, both in an Irish context and across the globe.
This three-year lecture series explores the theme of cultural loss and recovery across the centuries, from the Library of Alexandria in antiquity to the destruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland at the outset of the Irish Civil War in 1922. Lectures will reflect on how societies deal with cultural trauma through reconstruction and commemoration, and on how the international community should respond to contemporary acts of cultural atrocity.
The series is global in scope, pan-historical and multi-disciplinary in approach, and features a panel of international scholars and practitioners of the highest calibre
The Out of the Ashes lecture series is generously supported by Sean and Sarah Reynolds.
Find out more about the series here
Campus Location: Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute
Accessibility: Yes
Research Theme: Identities in Transformation
Event Category: Alumni, Arts and Culture, Lectures and Seminars, Library, Public
Type of Event: One-time event
Audience: Undergrad, Postgrad, Alumni, Faculty & Staff, Public
Cost: Free (but registration is essential)
Contact Name: Trinity Long Room Hub
More info: www.eventbrite.ie…
