Description:

The FOURTH ANNUAL WORKSHOP ON GLOBALIZING RACE STUDIES will examine our current socio-political climate. It takes as a
backdrop the transfer of power in the United States between Barack Obama, the first Black president elected to lead a major western
country, and Donald Trump, a candidate who rose to power through racially divisive rhetoric. Indeed, Trump’s political rise brought
with it and, importantly, was fueled by an explicit white nationalism. However, his election to the United States Presidency is
not only a re-sedimentation of a white masculinist nationalism, but it is also a declaration of war against people whose very
existence threatens the sanctity of whiteness and challenges its supremacy. This year’s workshop seeks presentations that
interrogate the following questions: To what extent are we witnessing something new or dealing with an extension of deeply
entrenched ideologies, or both? How do we begin to carefully and critically attend to the violent white backlash whose
target is not only politics, but actual Black and brown bodies? How much is this white backlash rooted in the old racial
ideologies that grew up with colonialism? In what ways does the spread of neoliberalism account for the intensity
of this current backlash? What movement strategies and/or forms of resistance are people of color drawing on to
challenge the election of Trump and the continued violent disregard of their lives?

SALADIN “DIN” AMBAR
Political Science, Lehigh University
MELANYE PRICE
Africana Studies, Rutgers University
TRACY DENEAN SHARPLEY-WHITING
Humanities and Director of African American and Diaspora Studies, Vanderbilt University
DEBRA E. THOMPSON
African American Studies, Northwestern University
ALVIN B. TILLERY JR.
Political Science and African American Studies, Northwestern University
CHRIS ZEPEDA-MILLAN
Comparative Ethnic Studies and Chair of Center for Research on Social Change,
University of California—Berkeley