Phyllis Cohen Rappaport ’68 New Century Term Professor of Government
“The Mississippi Runs into the Mekong: Colonial Collisions & Recursions”
The concept of “internal colonialism” has long been dismissed as insufficient for capturing the dynamics of racial domination in the United States: a powerful piece of rhetoric, perhaps, but a metaphor inattentive to the important distinctions between foreign or settler colonization and domestic racial oppression. This essay reassesses this view of the “internal colony” as mere analogy by situating the concept within the Black radical praxis out of which it emerged. Drawing on the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, Jack O’Dell, and the work of Black anti-draft organizers in SNCC, the paper reconstructs a conception of internal colonialism not as analogy but as analytic—a means of tracing colonialism’s collisions and recursions as they crisscrossed the boundaries between foreign and domestic, subjecting differently-situated peoples to constitutively linked forms of racial-colonial violence.
This External Faculty Seminar is hosted jointly with the JHU Department of Political Science.
When: Thursday, April 25, 2024, 12:00-1:30pm
Where: Mergenthaler 366, Homewood Campus or can be accessed on Zoom.
Zoom link: https://zoom.us/j/92121743165
This event is limited to JHU faculty, fellows, students, and staff.