Interrupting Weaponized Care: Anti-Racism and Decolonial Worldmaking

 

Race and Anti-Racism Across the Asia-Pacific event series

 

In our current moment during which anti-Asian racism has elicited responses of care and benevolence,  the panelists at this event critically consider the multiple ways in which such gestures of concern too often occlude and even participate in reproducing ongoing forms of racism, violence, and settler colonialism. Do sentimental proclamations of the need to stop hate actually disrupt the structures of the institutionalized settler state and white supremacy? How does expressing  “care” and “kindness” for some, enable the making of a racialized zone of killability and killing? How might solidarities across differences be built without reliance upon the liberal capitalist logics of private property, militarization, and accumulation, but instead draw from Asian diasporic feminist expressive cultures and indigenous geo-ontologies such as aloha ʻāina? The panelists will discuss these and other related matters around “care” and decolonial worldmaking through three presentations: “How to Have Solidarity with a Ghost: Haunting as Care in Chisato Hughes’ “Many Moons” (Prof. Hong);  “Becoming Hoa: Hawaiian Political Thought and the Question of Settler Aloha ‘Āina” (Prof. Maile); and “How Colonial Racial Capitalism Gets Things Done (Administrating Killability as Care) and the Doings that Undo It” (Profs. Melamed and Reddy).

 

 

PANELISTS' BIOS:

 

Grace Kyungwon Hong is the Director of the Center for the Study of Women|Streisand Center and Professor of Gender Studies and Professor of Asian American Studies at UCLA, where she teaches courses on women of color feminism, Asian American literature and culture, and racial capitalism and neoliberalism.

 

Uahikea Maile is a Kanaka Maoli scholar, organizer, and cultural practitioner from Maunawili, Oʻahu. He is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Politics in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. He is also the Director of Ziibiing Lab, which is a new research collaboratory on global Indigenous politics.

 

Jodi Melamed is Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies at Marquette University. She is the author of Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism. She is currently at work on a book project titled Operationalizing Racial Capitalism: On Liberalism’s Command Power with co-author, Chandan Reddy.

 

Chandan Reddy is Associate Professor in the departments of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies and the Comparative History of Ideas at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the author of Freedom With Violence: Race, Sexuality and the U.S. State (Duke University Press: 2011).