IRW Distinguished Lecture ? Bodies, Knowledge, and Sovereignty
Deborah Thomas
Thursday, December 5, 2024
Please join the Institute for Research on Women (IRW) for the second distinguished lecture of the academic year with Professor Deborah Thomas (University of Pennsylvania) on Thursday, December 5, in the Humanities Seminar Room, Academic Building 6051, College Avenue Campus from 11 am - 12.30 pm, followed by lunch for those who register.
Register here: https://forms.gle/R8RVNmwLqeDPBt7X9
Bodies, Knowledge, and Sovereignty
What does the body know? What can bodies tell us about ontologies that cannot be recuperated or resolved into Western ways of knowing? What can they tell us about the forms of collective world-building that exist outside of but in relation to the juridical structures of sovereignty that govern modern Western political and social life? Thinking through and with the space of Kumina in Jamaica, and particularly through a kumina festival I have co-organized for the past five years, I reflect on the ways community-based spaces of care, creativity, and spirituality can open portals to thinking beyond linearity, creating channels for accountability, and investigating contemporary mobilizations of personhood and political life on post-but-still-colonial terrain. I argue that being attuned to the body?s inheritances can provide inroads into genealogies of sovereignty alternative to those that are tethered to the foundational frames of property, accumulation, and dispossession.
Deborah A. Thomas is the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair (2019), which was awarded the Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Book Award from the Caribbean Studies Association in 2021 and the Senior Book Prize from the American Ethnological Society in 2020. She is also the author of Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica (2011), and Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and The Politics of Culture in Jamaica (2004). She is the coeditor of multiple volumes and the co-producer of two films: Bad Friday: Rastafari After Coral Gardens and Four Days in May.
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