Concerning Violence: A Collaborative Research Group

Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center and made possible by support from an anonymous donor, former Fellows, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities

Concerning Violence has now become an ongoing initiative that challenges the political, economic, ontological, and epistemic violence of coloniality with the goal of rethinking the premises of cultural and literary scholarship towards the practice of transformational knowledge production. Our theme this academic year is “Coloniality, Gender, and Empire: Theorizing Gender Violence and Transnational Feminisms.” Autumn quarter will be dedicated to the study of gender through analytics that trace what scholars identify as radical re-articulations of gender in the wake of colonial violence. Winter quarter will orient our attention to how gender is theorized and transformed through cultural productions such as literature, visual culture, and other cultural practices. Finally, Spring quarter will critically evaluate how contemporary transnational feminist theory addresses patriarchal and heteronormative violence that takes place through the archive, cultural practice, and global hierarchies of power. Concerning Violence’s analytical and thematic foundation finds inspiration from and is in conversation with Black Studies; European and North American critical theories of modernity; South Asian subaltern studies; Third World feminisms; postcolonial theory; African philosophy; and a modified world systems perspective. This seventh year of the Concerning Violence workshop coincides with a pivotal moment of intellectual growth within studies on violence as scholars from diverse fields such as Ethnic Studies, Comparative Literature, History, Philosophy, and Anthropology continue to adopt and transform such theories with respect to evolving conditions of neoliberal modernity, racial capitalism, neocolonialism, differentiated forms of precarity, migration, and dispossession. We will invite non-Stanford affiliated speakers who will synthesize and contribute additional thoughts pertaining to the relevant quarterly theme.