Producing Race

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Professor Falguni Sheth (Philosophy, Hampshire College) will present the key ideas of her book, Toward a Political Philosophy of Race (SUNY Press, 2009) that examines how, in fact, liberal society enables racism and other forms of discrimination and racialized hatred such as islamophobia in the US today. The discussion, led by Professor Alyson Cole (Political Science & Women’s Studies, Queens College & The Graduate Center, CUNY), will focus and expand on Chapter 5: Producing Race: Naturalizing the Exception Through the Rule of Law. Professor Kyoo Lee (Philosophy, John Jay College, CUNY) will moderate the conversation.

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About the book: “Toward a Political Philosophy of Race draws on the examples of the internment of U.S. citizens and residents of Japanese descent, of Muslim men and women in the contemporary United States, and of Asian Indians at the turn of the twentieth century, Falguni A. Sheth shows that racial discrimination and divisions are not accidents in the history of liberal societies. Race, she contends, is a process embedded in a range of legal technologies that produce racialized populations who are divided against other groups. Moving past discussions of racial and social justice as abstract concepts, she reveals the playing out of race, racialization of groups, and legal frameworks within concrete historical frameworks.”

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Online Notes

Author Bio

Presented By:

Alyson Cole is Associate Professor of Political Science at Queens College and the Graduate Center, where she has been based since 2002. She is the recipient of the 2008 President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, and her research and teaching interests bridge political theory and American politics/culture. Cole’s work links central questions of political thought—especially formulations of justice, the nature of subjugation, and the possibility of resistance or change—with an examination of concrete political ideologies, rhetoric, and law/policy-making, emphasizing aspects of subject-formation, gender and race/ethnicity. Cole is the author of The Cult of True Victimhood: From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror (Stanford University Press, 2007). Her articles have appeared in Signs, American Studies, Feminist Studies, the Michigan Law Review, and the National Women’s Studies Association Journal. She is on the editorial boards of Women’s Studies Quarterly and International Journal of Criminology and Sociological Theory. Currently, Cole is working on a new project on affective labor.


Presented By:

Falguni A. Sheth is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Political Theory at Hampshire College. Professor Sheth holds a B.A. in Rhetoric and minor in South Asian Studies from UC Berkeley, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the New School for Social Research. She works in the areas of continental philosophy, political philosophy and legal theory, critical race theory and philosophy of race, post-colonial, theory, and sub-altern and gender studies.

Professor Sheth has published numerous articles and two books, Race, Liberalism, and Economics(coedited, U. Michigan Press, 2004) and Toward a Political Philosophy of Race(SUNY Press, 2009). Her most recent book argues that racial divisions are fundamental to polities, and argues this point through the examples by exploring the situation of Muslims and Arabs, the caste system, the practice of veiling, and the history of liberalism.

Professor Sheth's current research is in several areas: hybrid subjectivity and race; Foucault’s biopolitics in the context of legal subjectivity; the emergence and legal construction of Punjabi-Mexicans at the turn of the 20th century; and the metaphysics of misrecognition. Sheth has served on the Immigrant Rights Commission of San Francisco and Hampshire College's Board of Trustees, and is an organizer of the California Roundtable for Philosophy and Race.


Presented By:

Kyoo Lee is currently Assistant Professor of Philosophy at John Jay College, CUNY, where she is also affiliated faculty for Gender Studies and Justice Studies Programs. In addition, she teaches courses and leads faculty seminars in feminist and critical theories at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she started as a Mellon Faculty Fellow (2009-2010).

Dually trained in Continental philosophy (Warwick Univ.) and literary theory (London Univ.), Kyoo Lee publishes widely in the intersecting fields of the theoretical Humanities such as Aesthetics, Asian American Studies, Comparative Literature/Philosophy, Continental Philosophy, Critical Race theory, Cultural Studies, Deconstruction, Feminist Philosophy, Gender Studies, Poetics, Post-phenomenology and Translation. Her first and forthcoming book is titled Reading Descartes Otherwise (Fordham University Press), which explores Cartesian alterities such as blindness, madness, dreaminess and badness, in that order; currently, she is working or else sitting on a few other “alterities” projects, including one that looks at intersectional differences between xenophobia(/philia) and racism.