Come and hear me talk about ‘Resisting the New Racial Regime on Thursday September 4 at 11.30-1 as part of the Institute for Culture & Society at Western Sydney University seminar series.
Where? WSU Parramatta South Campus, Building EA, Ground Floor, Room 32. (This is the building directly in front of you when you arrive at the front of the campus).
The New Racial Regime: Recalibrations of White Supremacy, builds on Black Studies scholar, Cedric J. Robinson’s, idea of racial regimes: ‘constructed social systems in which race is proposed as a justification for relations of power’ whose ‘covering conceit… is a makeshift patchwork masquerading as memory and the immutable’ (Robinson 2007: xii). Using an ensemble of histories, theories, hypotheses, studies, representations and lies, racial regimes are necessary for the deployment of racial capitalism.
My talk draws on examples from The New Racial Regime – counterinsurgency within educational institutions, attacks on Black and Indigenous history, and the curious co-optation of decolonising initiatives – to pull back the curtain on the functioning of racial regimes as they support racial capitalism hurtling towards fascism. I explore how the recalibrated racial regime of the 2020s, ‘stitched together from remnants of its predecessors and old cloth’ (ibid. xiv), undergirds the formation of new expressions of white supremacy. The recalibration of the racial regime is always a response to resistance from below, which unpicks its stitches even as it appears ascendant. Working collectively to gather the resources necessary for this effort is the work we are called to in the face of increasing assaults on the People’s freedom dreams.