Humanist Horizons in the Visual Culture of the Long War on Terror

Keith Feldman’s research program takes cultural studies approaches to theorize and narrate the interface between race, culture, knowledge, and state power. His work explores race as a “master category” (following Omi and Winant) and as a “medium” (following WJT Mitchell) by crafting comparative, relational, intersectional, and transnational analyses situated in localized and embodied contexts. By turning to the domain of culture, he investigates how power differentials become sedimented and contested in narrative, subject and identity formations, memory, and knowledge production. He is one of the faculty co-organizers of The Color of New Media, a working group sponsored by the Center for Race and Gender and Berkeley Center for New Media that focuses on intersections of critical race theory, gender and women’s studies, and transnational studies with new media studies. With Prof. Abigail De Kosnik, he is co-editing a collection of essays by the working group entitled #identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation (forthcoming from University of Michigan Press). His recent works include A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America (Minnesota, 2015), “You (Shall) Have the Body: Patterns of Life in the Shadow of Guantánamo” (The Comparatist, 2018) and his current book-length project, Patterns of Life: Raciality, Visuality, Global War.

The event is free and open to the public.

This lecture is organized by the Institute of American Studies in cooperation with Lise-Meitner-scholar Dr. Jennifer Reimer’s FWF project “Forms of Migration in 21st Century Literature.” Prof. Feldman’s visit to the University of Graz is sponsored by FWF.