Description:

Talk by Lisa Marie Cacho

This talk examines an unnamed deputy sheriff’s shooting of Delmar Espejo at the Hawaiʻi State Capitol Building in Honolulu on February 18, 2019. Lisa Marie Cacho argues that the reason why Delmar Espejo could be shot had less to do with his actions and more to do with the role of law enforcement agencies in enforcing settler colonialism, normalizing US occupation, and securing colonial racial capitalism and private property relations. Although Delmar was Filipino, a marginalized and disadvantaged ethnic group in Hawaiʻi, he was able to be killed was because the logics and logistics that normalize Kanaka Maoli dispossession require police violence against anyone who challenges Western epistemologies, resists land-as-property centered lifestyles, or exposes the illegitimacy of US occupation. 

Bio: Lisa Marie Cacho is an Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Virginia. Professor Cacho’sscholarship interrogates the ways in which human value is both ascribed and denied relationally along racial, gendered, sexual, national, and spatial lines. Her book, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (NYU press, 2012) won the John Hope Franklin award in 2013 for best book in American Studies. She is also an editor, along with Susan Koshy, Jodi Byrd, and Brian Jefferson, of the collection Colonial Racial Capitalism, which will be published later this year. Her most recent publications can be found in The Boston Review, Social Text, Critical Dialogues in Latinx Studies, and American Quarterly. Professor Cacho’s current book project examines police killings in the United States.