Postcolonial Spatialities with Elspeth Iralu

This is an Archive of a Past Event

Please join us in conversation with Dr. Elspeth Iralu and her current work on the spatial surveillance of Indigenous peoples, nations, and territories in the 21st century. You can learn more about Dr. Iralu’s work below.



 

About the Speaker

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Elspeth Iralu is a visiting assistant professor at the University of New Mexico and a Stanford Humanities Center Mellon Fellow. She is Angami Naga, from Khonoma village, Nagaland, and grew up in Gallup, New Mexico. Her research and teaching interests include Indigenous geographies and methodologies, visual culture, critical surveillance studies, and planning for decolonial futures. Iralu’s first book project examines the global spatial surveillance of Indigenous peoples, nations, and territories in the 21st century through a multi-site relational analysis of colonial surveillance and Indigenous resistance in the United States, India, and Palestine. The book takes up air as a material through which to understand contrapuntal relationships of colonialism to demonstrate how air and the aerial perspective actively shape what happens on and below the ground. Analyzing Indigenous graphic novels, video games, virtual reality, performance protests, and visual art, Iralu argues that Indigenous experiences of surveillance are not limited by the geographic and legal bounds of nation-states but are rather linked through global histories of militarization and resistance.
 
Her writing has appeared in American Quarterly, The New Americanist, Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, and Species in Peril. She has worked on community projects for environment, health, and sovereignty with Indigenous nations in India and the United States.
 
For more information, please see descriptions of Dr. Iralu’s work here and here.