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Spring
2008 lecture
Black Power, Sexual Violence, and the Politics of Multiracialism
Jared Sexton
Monday, April 21
4:15 pm in the Cassani Room, 102 Shattuck Hall, MHC
Jared Sexton
is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Film and Media
Studies at the University of California, Irvine, where he is also affiliated
with the Critical Theory Institute and the Center in Law, Culture,
and Society. His research and teaching interests include black cultural
studies, race and sexuality, policing and mass imprisonment, and contemporary
U.S. film culture. Professor Sexton's most recent publication is his
book, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2008). Professor Sexton's presentation, “Black Power, Sexual Violence, and the Politics of
Multiracialism,” suggests that the contemporary politics of multiracialism
in the United States augment the neoconservative discourse of "reverse
racism" by promoting the image of blacks as an authoritarian political
bloc that illegitimately determines the direction of federal policymaking.
Far from a strategic offensive deploying classic divide-and-conquer tactics,
multiracialism is more appropriately understood as a rationalizing discourse
for the continued and increasing isolation of blacks in American society.
As the color line of the twentieth-century is transformed into "the
new black/non-black divide" of the twenty-first, collective antipathy
toward the lived experience of the black underwrites the possibility
of a "post racial” national rapprochement and multiracialism
offers a sizeable contribution to that end.
This
lecture is made possible by the generous support of the Office of
the Dean of the College, the Office of the Dean of Faculty, the Department
of English and the American Studies Program at Mount Holyoke, and
the American Studies Program at Smith College.
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