At Risk U Speaker Series: Resurging Pro-Power Pedagogies

Jodi Melamed is professor of English and Race, Ethnic, and Indigenous Studies at Marquette University. She is the author of Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minnesota UP, 2011), co-editor of Economies of Dispossession: Indigeneity, Race, Capitalism (with Jodi A. Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, and Chandan Reddy), a special issue of the journal Social Text. Her influential essay, “Racial Capitalism,” is among the most cited articles in the journal Critical Ethnic Studies. She has published widely on relational approaches to critical race and ethnic studies and gendered racial capitalism in widely cited essays including “Predatory Value: Economies of Dispossession and Disturbed Relationalities” (with Jodi A. Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, and Chandan Reddy), “The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial liberalism to neoliberal multiculturalism,” “Using Liberal Rights to Enforce Racial Capitalism” (with Chandan Reddy) and “ Don’t Arrest Me, Arrest the Police: Policing as the Street Administration of Colonial Racial Capitalism” (with Lisa Cacho). Her current book project, Operationalizing Racial Capitalism: From its Command Powers to its Undoing (with Chandan Reddy) is under contract with Verso Books.

Abstract:
Apollo Global CEO Mark Rowan’s trajectory from the Wharton School Board of Trustees at the  University of Pennsylvania to the Donald Trump’s Board of Peace reveals that attacks on Palestine campus movements were never meant only to silence criticism of Israel. They have always been about producing alignment with a financialized, technology-driven permanent war and reconstruction economy of militarize accumulation under autocratic rule. I argue that the repressive strategies used by Marc Rowan and others against Palestine on campus serve to institute pro-power pedagogies at U.S. universities and beyond. They teach the superiority of the powerful in a time of rule by capitalist autocrats. They forbid critiques of power in a time of genocide. They revive colonial divisions of humanity that allow oppressors to appear as victims and the survival imperatives of oppressed communities as security threats. Luckily, resurging pro-power pedagogies are losing ground in the face of the grammar Palestinian resistance provides for joining struggles and prefiguring and inhabiting alternatives to colonial racial capitalist orders.