Please note: the in-person event is only open to current students, staff, and faculty. Otherwise, please register to attend the virtual lecture.

Recent Work on Race and Ethnicity in Contemporary Politics - The political science department is pleased and excited to announce a lecture series on "Recent Work on Race and Ethnicity in Contemporary Politics." The series will feature scholars pursuing research at the very cutting edge in political science.  Three lectures have been scheduled for this Fall, all of which will be on Zoom. We hope to have additional speakers in the Spring, with a format to be determined.  We warmly encourage you to attend any or all of the lectures in this series.

Siddhant Issar - "Mapping the Logics of Contemporary Racial Capitalism"

How should we understand contemporary anti-Black racism and its intergenerational reproduction? Why are Black and Indigenous populations disproportionately impacted by crises, whether it be the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007 or the current Covid-19 pandemic? To address these questions, this talk thinks with the Movement for Black Lives to put forth a critical theory of racial capitalism. Such a theory maps the changing relations between racial slavery and its afterlives, ongoing Indigenous dispossession, and American capital accumulation. This framework, in turn, reveals how the contemporary neoliberal era (and its corresponding crises) expands and generalizes extant logics of racial and colonial expropriation. In terms of politically contesting the racial order, the talk also considers how the framework of racial capitalism emphasizes forms of solidarity and coalition building that eschew an emphasis on homogeneity, redirecting progressive and left politics past false binaries between anti-racist, decolonial, and anti-capitalist struggles. 

Siddhant Issar is a Rising Scholar Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. His research and teaching interests lie in Black and Indigenous political thought, modern and contemporary political theory, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the politics of race, class, and settler colonialism in the US. His work has been published in Contemporary Political Theory, Race & Class, The Black Scholar, and in an edited volume, Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg. Issar is currently working on a book manuscript, titled Theorizing Racial Capitalism in the Era of Black Lives Matter. 

Issar holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a B.A. and M.A. from Wesleyan University and The Graduate Center, City University of New York, respectively