Description:

Fall Keynote of the Kaplan Humanities Institute's SOVEREIGNTIES Dialogue:

Sovereignty Struggles Through and Beyond the State

With political anthropologist Yarimar Bonilla (Professor in American Studies, Effron Center for the Study of America at Princeton University) and writer and public historian Adrian De Leon (Assistant Professor of U.S. History, New York University).

Moderator: katrina quisumbing king (Assistant Professor of Sociology and Kaplan Institute Fellow)

In conversation with moderator katrina quisumbing king, Yarimar Bonilla and Adrian De Leon will reflect on how humanistic and creative approaches shed important light on the tremendous political battles for sovereignty today. Bringing their own creative and scholarly work on US empire to bear on this question, Bonilla and De Leon will discuss how histories re-emerge in the present and shape the ways states try to control people’s movements and territory as well as how individuals and collectives create their own resistant sovereignties.

A reception will follow the event.

Yarimar Bonilla is a professor at the Effron Center for the Study of America at Princeton University and a contributing writer for the New York Times. Both an accomplished scholar and a prominent public intellectual, Dr. Bonilla teaches and writes broadly on questions of race, citizenship, empire, and the entanglements of postcolonial sovereignty. She is the author and editor of several books, including Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment, Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm, and Trouillot Remixed: The Michel Rolph Trouillot Reader.

Adrian De Leon is the author of barangay: an offshore poem (Buckrider Books, 2021) and Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America (University of North Carolina Press, Dec. 2023). His current book project, Balikbayan: The Invention of the Filipino Homeland, is under contract with the University of Washington Press. He is the 2023-2024 Jack and Nancy Farley Distinguished Visiting Scholar in History at Simon Fraser University, and an incoming Assistant Professor of U.S. History at New York University.  

About the Sovereignties Dialogue

SOVEREIGNTIES is a year-long conversation that mobilizes humanities research to question, understand, and reimagine sovereignties—bodily, artistic, intellectual, geopolitical—and their global histories, contemporary challenges, and possible futures.

This Dialogue series seeks to examine Sovereignties in many dimensions. Restrictions on bodily autonomy—from borders to identity to reproductive rights—are pressing in familiar and unfamiliar ways. Collectives and individuals are practicing sovereignty beyond state formations—in gardens, on floating cities, in activist solidarities—even while confronting the consequences of pollution that seeps into bodies and foods. The Kaplan Humanities Institute Sovereignties Dialogue will contend with these contradictions, the histories that re-emerge in the present, and the forms of belonging forged against, within, and beyond the state.