"Vanishing Racialised Bodies": David Theo Goldberg in conversation with Brad Evans and Chantal Meza
The “State of Disappearance” series asks urgent questions about extreme violence, the normalization of human vanishing, state and ideological complicity, and memorialization, along with wider concerns about what it means to be human in the twenty-first century.
In this event, Brad Evans and Chantal Meza will be joined by renowned critical race theorist David Theo Goldberg. Addressing the relationship between disappearance and racialised bodies, the conversation will attend to the history of racial persecution, the vanishing of bodies from sites of meaning, memory and justice, along with the ways the violence of disappearance is marking the present. As disappearance sets apart those who should be looked upon with dignity from those whom society deems to be disposable, the question of absence is rethought.
This conversation is part of the ongoing State of Disappearance project: https://www.historiesofviolence.com/stateofdisappearance
David Theo Goldberg is the former director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute and a distinguished professor of comparative literature, anthropology, and criminology, law and society at UC Irvine. Goldberg’s work ranges over issues of social, political and critical theory, race and racism, the future of the university and digital technology. He has written extensively on race and racism. His books include Are We All Postracial Yet? (2015), Dread: Facing Futureless Futures (2021), and The War on Critical Race Theory (2023).
Brad Evans is a political philosopher, critical theorist, and writer whose work focuses on the problem of violence. He is the author of twenty books and edited volumes, along with over a hundred and fifty academic and international media articles. He is the founding director of the Centre for the Study of Violence and holds a Chair in Political Violence & Aesthetics at the University of Bath.
Website: https://www.brad-evans.co.uk
Chantal Meza is a self-taught abstract painter living and working in the United Kingdom. Her works have been exhibited in more than 30 group and individual exhibitions in prominent museums and galleries in Mexico, Paraguay, and the United Kingdom.
Website: https://www.chantal-meza.com