Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing & Prison in a Penal Democracy October 11, 2007

WARFARE in the AMERICAN HOMELAND:
POLICING and PRISON in a PENAL DEMOCRACY

Featuring:

Anthony Monteiro, "The Racialized State, Black Bodies, and the 'War on Terror'"

Tiffany King, "The Politics of (Dis)possession: Black Women and the Work of Dismantling the State"

Dylan Rodriguez, "The Terms of Engagement"

Jared Sexton, "What Blackness Entails: Comparative Analysis and Coalition Politics"

Tamara K. Nopper, "Racism and Immigration Enforcement"

Moderated by Kenyon Farrow

DESCRIPTION of EVENT:
While the US wages war abroad there is also warfare in the homeland.

The U.S. has more than 2 million people locked away in prisons. Although most of the U.S. population is non-Hispanic and white, the vast majority of the incarcerated—and policed—is not. The interning or policing of citizens of color, the activism of radicals, structural racism, destruction and death in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, and the FBI Counterintelligence Program designed to quash domestic dissent suggest that the US may actually be a penal democracy.

Inspired by, and featuring contributors to the new anthology Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy, this panel explores the realities of domestic warfare that enable a penal democracy to thrive. Panelists will consider how surveillance, policing, imprisonment, and public policies serve to enforce the racialized, gendered, and sexualized boundaries of civil society, belonging, and citizenship. Themes that will be explored include Hurricane Katrina, immigration enforcement, the racialized state, and Black women’s resistance.

DATE and TIME:
Thursday, October 11, 2007

5-7pm

LOCATION:
Temple University, Philadelphia

Kiva Auditorium (in Ritter Annex Hall, 13th and Montgomery)

SPONSORS:
Temple University College of Liberal Arts, American Studies Program, Women’s Studies Program, Center for Humanities, and the Departments of Anthropology, Geography and Urban Studies, History, and Sociology

Free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase.

For more information, contact Tamara K. Nopper at tnopper@temple.edu

PARTICIPANTS:

ANTHONY MONTEIRO teaches in the Department of African American Studies at Temple University. His scholarly writings include sociology of knowledge, W.E.B. Du Bois Studies, critical Marxist theory, and Africana philosophical and social thought. He is co-director of the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought at Temple University. He also has a long activist history in Civil Rights, Black Power, African Liberation, and anti-death penalty work. Dr. Monteiro is a life long resident of North Philadelphia, where he grew up in Zion Baptist Church and attended the Philadelphia public schools. He received his BA from Lincoln University, attended the University of Chicago under a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, and received his PhD in sociology from Temple University. He has taught at several universities, including the University of the Sciences, Rutgers and Drexel Universities, and the University of Pennsylvania. Over 100 of his articles on topics related to Black people and the Black struggle have been published. Dr. Monteiro’s current book projects include a monograph on W.E.B. Du Bois entitled W.E.B. Du Bois and the Study of Black Humanity and a volume co-edited with Professor Martin Kilson of Harvard University on One Hundred Years of Black Philadelphia.

KENYON FARROW is a journalism graduate student at the City University of New York and a writer and activist whose work addresses racism, Black communities, queerness, and policing and prisons. Much of Farrow’s writing can be found on blogs all over the net as well as in print publications, including City Limits, POZ Magazine, and The Nation Magazine. He co-edited Letters from Young Activists, a popular anthology published by Nation Books. As an activist, he served as the Southern Regional Coordinator for Critical Resistance, a community oversight criminal justice organization, and continues to work on the national organizing body. Additionally, he currently serves on the board for Queers for Economic Justice. Farrow has also served as an adult ally for FIERCE!, a queer youth of color community organizing project in New York City, and as communications and public education coordinator of the New York State Black Gay Network. Farrow is a co-editor of the anthology A New Queer Agenda, forthcoming from NYU Press. He is currently writing his first solo book exploring African Americans and coalition politics.


DYLAN RODRIGUEZ is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. As a scholar-activist, his work emphasizes the intersections of race, state violence, and radicalism. Among other political-intellectual collectives, he has worked within and alongside such organizations as Critical Resistance, INCITE!, the Critical Filipino and Filipina Studies Collective and the editorial board of the journal Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict, and World Order. He is the author of the book Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime as well as essays that have appeared in such places as Radical History Review, Social Justice, and the South End Press anthologies What Lies Beneath: Katrina, Race, and the State of the Nation and The Revolution will Not be Funded: Beyond the Non-profit Industrial Complex.

TIFFANY KING is a Davis-Putter Scholar who just completed her M.A. in Sociology in Education at the University of Toronto. While in Toronto she organizes with INCITE! Toronto. She is a co-founder of Resistahs in Wilmington, Delaware. Resistahs is a community education collective which supports the personal and political development of Black women. Their community education programs include, “Breakin’ Down bell: The Works of bell hooks” and “Violent Intersections.” King is also contributor to the anthology The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex.

JARED SEXTON is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Film & Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine. His teaching and research interests include race and sexuality, prisons and policing, coalition politics, and contemporary film. He has published articles in journals such as Antipode, Art Journal, Qui Parle, Radical History Review, Social Identities, and Social Justice, as well as a number of recent anthologies on race, politics, and popular culture in the post-civil rights era United States. His first book, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism, is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press.

TAMARA K. NOPPER is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Temple University, where she also teaches in both Sociology and American Studies. Her research and teaching interests are Asian American communities and politics, Black-Asian relations, immigration, entrepreneurship, globalization, racial science, and race theory. Her dissertation research explores how Korean and Korean American banks and federal government agencies work together to make capital and resources available to Korean immigrant entrepreneurs in the US. She has also written scholarly articles about the 1992 Los Angeles Riots and immigration enforcement as well as many on-line articles that have been widely circulated.

Official Website: http://www.southendpress.org/2007/10/11/events/274