Civil War: Race Under Representation

UCHRI Podcast

As part of its Fall 2019 inquiry into civil war, UCHRI gathered colleagues from across the UC system and beyond for a lecture and seminar discussion about how racial formation and aesthetic tradition mutually constitute what we think of as the essential form of the civil subject: the autonomous, universal individual that has been a bedrock of Western political ideology since the Enlightenment. Here, Distinguished Professor of English, David Lloyd (UC Riverside), critically interrogates what he characterizes as "this Hegelian commitment, on Fanon's part, to the transformation of the racial, colonized 'thing' into the human" in the context of a larger question: "What constitutes the civil order of the state and the humans it constitutes?" Assistant Professor of Literature, Ameeth Vijay (UC San Diego), offers a response connecting the talk to Lloyd's latest book, Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics, by thinking through the concept of development and temporalities of subjectification in 18th- and 19th-century Western philosophy. For more information on UCHRI's initiative on Civil War, see: https://uchri.org/projects/civil-war/.