Current Issues Lecture
Dr. Mike Hill, Professor of English, University at Albany, SUNY
Date: December 4, 2018
Time: 14:15–15:45
Place: UTU, Educarium (Assistentinkatu 5), Lecture Hall Edu3 (third floor)
Scholars and commentators on the US Presidential Election all over the world are struggling to explain the election of Donald Trump to the White House. Michael Moore's blunt formulation in the new film Fahrenheit 11/9 expresses both the shock and the frustration of those on the progressive Left: "What the f*ck happened?" Without wanting to add to the monomaniacal focus on Trump himself, this talk examines the rise of the so-called blue-collar billionaire within the context of the now legitimated sub-discipline of critical whiteness studies. What did we learn about whiteness—and more crucially—what did we miss in the several decades now of all that learning? How did race scholars and political pundits alike fail to anticipate the "white lash" that helped put together the latest unholy marriage between "American" working-class voters and the “plutocracy, kleptocracy, autocracy, xenophobia, and racism” (Greenwald, 2018) now dominating the US political scene? In an age that, on the one hand, recognizes—and even encourages—the fluidity of identity in the context of a coming US white minority, while on the other, snapping back to the most retrograde elements of racial populism, what can we make of contemporary mutations in traditional democratic mainstays: civil society, consensus, mutual recognition, and not least, the security-related questions of economic vulnerability, as much as the permanence and ubiquity of war? What do identity politics look like after whiteness, especially in the sense that the state/identity relationship is both intensified and hollowed-out? This talk seeks to explain the paradoxical nature of contemporary whiteness as something lost and something gained, a historical fiction and a brutal reality, whose presence is being fortified to the degree that its coherence recedes into the past.
Dr. Mike Hill is Professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY. He has published widely and teaches regularly eighteenth-century studies, materialist theory, contemporary US race relations, and more recently, the philosophy of war. His books are: The Other Adam Smith (Stanford: 2015) (co-authored with Warren Montag); After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority (NYU: 2004); Masses, Classes, and the Public Sphere (Verso: 2000) (contributing ed.); and Whiteness: A Critical Reader (NYU: 1997) (contributing ed.). Hill is currently completing Volume One of Ecologies of War: The Human Terrain for the University of Minnesota Press. A second volume on war and climate change will follow.
The event is free of charge and open to all. Students may collect lecture pass entries. Organized by the JMC and sponsored by the UTU Department of Philosophy, Contemporary History and Political Science.
