Tulia Falleti on Sept 12 | Dispossessions in the Americas: The Extraction of Bodies, Territories, and Cultural Heritage from La Conquista to the Present

We are excited to announce the launch of our Fall 2024 Agrarian Studies Colloquium Series with a special lecture by Tulia G. Falleti, Class of 1965 Endowed Term Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania. The event will be held on Thursday, September 12, between 4:30 and 6:00 pm in Henry R. Luce Hall Auditorium (Room 101) at 34 Hillhouse Avenue.

The lecture title and abstract is as follows:  

Dispossessions in the Americas: The Extraction of Bodies, Territories, and Cultural Heritage from La Conquista to the Present

Systemic racism is built on historical, structural, and institutionalized dispossessions of minoritized populations such as the Indigenous and the Afro-descendants. These dispossessions, from the first colonial encounters to the present-day, include dispossessions of territories, bodies, and cultural heritage. Dispossession is material and ideological, traceable to an historical conquest, yet marked in the present. To rectify dispossession is to look back and forth, to repair material loss, but also to attend to how historical values and ideologies can hybridize our present, marking it with the cultural inheritance not only of the conquerors but also of the dispossessed. With these premises as points of departure, and with generous funding from the Mellon Foundation, over the last four years I have coordinated and collaborated with a large interdisciplinary group of Penn professors, postdoctoral fellows, graduate and undergraduate research assistants, and with partners (activists, artists, and scholars) from 13 countries in the Americas to document dispossessions and resistances to it. In this lecture, I will present advances of our collective transdisciplinary research and of the public-facing website we aim to launch in fall of 2024.