Exceptional Violence

The 8th public lecture in our Fall 2016 Proseminar Speaker Series, "Who the People: Punctuating Politics in the USA, Being America in the World."

Speaker: Prof. Nikhil Pal Singh, New York University 

Nikhil Pal Singh is Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University and Faculty Director of the NYU Prison Education Program. He is the author of Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Harvard, 2004), editor and co-author with Jack O’Dell of Climbing Jacob’s Ladder: the Black Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O’Dell (California, 2010), and author of the forthcoming Exceptional Empire: Race and War in US Globalism (Harvard). His essays have appeared in American Quarterly, South Atlantic Quarterly, Radical History Review, and Social Text, among other periodicals. His most recent essay, “On Race, Violence and So-Called Primitive Accumulation,” is published in the latest issue of Social Text.

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The Division of Social Studies presents the Fall 2016 Proseminar in Humanistic and Social Scientific Inquiry on the theme of "Who the People: Punctuating Politics in the USA, Being “America" in the World." This Fall, we engage with questions of the vitality, legitimacy, promise, im/possibility of democratic life that haunt one of the largest democracies in the world, which is also, indeed, one of the largest global imperial powers. How do the frames of polis, nation-state, colony, and postcolony intersect in the United States of America, and how are we to understand the people that fill out or outline these enclosures? What are the self-conceptions and proclamations, indeed also sighs and laments, of “the people” enclosed within these frames, and how do they impact the claims the people are able to make with regard to the meaning of politics, the political process, participation, and possibility--and indeed the very possibility of life within and without the polity. What must a transdisciplinary and decolonial inquiry into these matters of life and death look like, where does and must it happen, who does and must undertake it--and what affects and actions must it seek to enable and disable in us?