Talk: “Racial Banishment: A Postcolonial Critique of the Urban Condition in America” by Ananya Roy

• Talk

• Event Date: Tuesday, March 5, 2019
• Time: 6:00 pm (CST)
• Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL
• Cost: Free Admission

This talk is concerned with processes of racial banishment, which Roy conceptualizes as state-instituted violence against racialized bodies and communities. Breaking with narratives of neoliberalization, Roy foregrounds how dispossession and disposability are being remade in the contemporary American metropolis. Holding in simultaneous view black studies and postcolonial theory, Roy seeks to pinpoint the workings of racial capitalism at both urban and global scales. Such frameworks also make possible the study of imaginations and practices that challenge banishment and insist on freedom. Thinking from postcolonial Los Angeles, Roy shares examples of movements and struggles that work to dismantle the color-lines of the 21st century.

About the Speaker

Ananya Roy is Professor of Urban Planning and Social Welfare and Inaugural Director of the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA. Roy has written on urban transformations in the Global South in City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty, and Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global (co-edited with Aihwa Ong). Her research has also been centrally concerned with new regimes of international development in Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development and Territories of Poverty: Rethinking North and South.

This event is organized by the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory in partnership with the Departments of Geography and Urban & Regional Planning.