"Colonial Difference: the Neoliberal Present."
Professor Lisa Lowe
Tufts University
Hum 1, Room 210
4:ooPM
Reception to follow
This lecture casts the history of liberal modernity as a complex, braided project, which includes at once the universal promises of rights, emancipation, wage labor and free trade, as well as the global divisions and colonial asymmetries upon which those promises depend, and according to which such liberties are reserved for some and denied to others. A history of the present, which defamiliarizes given narratives of the present social formation, may reveal the subsumption of colonial difference in the history of modern progress, and query the assumptions regarding the continuity of the neoliberal present as either the apotheosis or betrayal of the liberal project.
Lisa Lowe is a scholar in the fields of comparative literature, and the cultural politics of race, colonialism, and diaspora at Tufts University. Before joining Tufts, she taught in the Literature Department at UC San Diego for over two decades. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, and the School of Advanced Study of London. Lowe is the author of Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Cornell UP), Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Duke UP), and coauthor of The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Duke UP). Her most recent project, The Intimacies of Four Continents, a study of the global conditions for liberal economy, knowledge, culture, and politics, is forthcoming from Duke UP in 2015. Lowe received her Ph.D. in Literature from UC Santa Cruz.
