Michael Hardt: The Subversive Seventies | December 16, 2023

December 16, 2023

A bold reconstruction of the history of revolutionary politics in the 1970s with political philosopher and literary theorist Michael Hardt.

Join SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement for Michael Hardt: The Subversive Seventies. This was a free event diving into Michael Hardt’s latest book, a thought-provoking reconsideration of how the revolutionary movements of the 1970s set the mould for today’s activism.

The event featured a discussion on the book with scholars Glen Coulthard, Alberto Toscano, and Sharon Luk, moderated by Brenna Bhandar.

Bios:

Michael Hardt

Michael Hardt teaches political theory in the Literature Program at Duke University. He is co-author, with Antonio Negri, of the Empire trilogy and, most recently, Assembly. He is co-director with Sandro Mezzadra of The Social Movements Lab.

Brenna Bhandar, moderator

Prior to joining Allard Law, Brenna was a Reader in Law and Critical Theory at SOAS, University of London, and previously held faculty positions at the Queen Mary School of Law, Kent Law School and the University of Reading Law School. She has also held visiting appointments at L’École des hautes études en science sociales (Paris) and the Stellenbosch University Faculty of Law (South Africa).

Brenna earned a BA (Hons.) in South Asian Studies and History from the University of Toronto, her LLB at UBC, and was called to the Bar of British Columbia after clerking at the BC Court of Appeal and articling with Arvay Finlay. The recipient of numerous graduate scholarships, she completed her PhD at Birkbeck School of Law, University of London. Brenna’s research and teaching broadly lie within the fields of property studies and legal theory, spanning the disciplines of property law, critical theory, colonial legal history and critical race feminism. Her book Colonial Lives of Property: Law Land and Racial Regimes of Ownership was published in 2018 with Duke University Press, and the co-edited book (with Rafeef Ziadah) Revolutionary Feminisms: Conversations on Collective Action and Radical Thought was published in 2020 with Verso.

Glen Coulthard, respondent

Glen Coulthard is Yellowknives Dene and an associate professor in the First Nations and Indigenous Studies Program and the Departments of Political Science at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), winner of the 2016 Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Frantz Fanon Award for Outstanding Book, the Canadian Political Science Association’s CB Macpherson Award for Best Book in Political Theory, published in English or French, in 2014/2015, and the Rik Davidson Studies in Political Economy Award for Best Book in 2016. He is also a co-founder of Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning, a decolonial, Indigenous land-based post-secondary program operating on his traditional territories in Denendeh(Northwest Territories).

Alberto Toscano, respondent

Alberto Toscano is Reader in Critical Theory at the Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London, where he co-directs the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought. He is a Term Research Associate Professor at the Digital Democracy Institute, School of Communication, SFU.

Alberto’s current research is divided into three main strands: a theoretical inquiry into contemporary authoritarian trends and their dis/analogies with their historical predecessors, culminating in the forthcoming book Late Fascism (Verso, 2023); the study of tragedy as a framework through which to understand political action and its discontents, from decolonisation to environmentalism; and the development of ‘real abstraction’ as a heuristic for the analysis contemporary capitalism, notably in its nexus with processes of racialisation. As the series editor of The Italian List for Calcutta-based publisher Seagull books, Alberto’s research is also concerned with the translation and reception of Italian literature, literary criticism and critical theory.

Sharon Luk, respondent

Sharon Luk is Associate Professor and Tier II Canada Research Chair of Geographies of Racialization at Simon Fraser University. Her first monograph, The Life of Paper: Letters and a Poetics of Living Beyond Captivity (University of California Press, 2018), won major awards from the American Studies Association and the Modern Language Association. She has previously served as faculty or postdoctoral fellow at UCLA, Stanford University, and the University of Oregon. Her research has appeared in the journals Journal of American History, Antipode, American Quarterly, The New Centennial Review, Souls, Environment and Planning D, and the forthcoming issue of Critical Ethnic Studies.

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