What sorts of affective worldings emerge from the spectacularization and consumption of ‘ordinary’ racialized death? How can we read projects of memorialization as intimately entwined with the mobilization of national subjects within broader mechanisms of hypervigilance and surveillance against people of colour? What connections can we make between practices of trans memoralization and state-securitization? Tracing the connections between necropolitical intimacy, spectacularized violence, and ‘bare life’ in the circulation of affective belonging, this talk explores the centrality of “necrointimacies” in structuring whiteness as emblematic of contemporary life.

Dr. Nael Bhanji is an Assistant Professor at Trent University’s Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, and graduate faculty in the Departments of Cultural Studies and English. As a critical race and trans studies theorist, his research draws upon psychoanalysis and affect theory in order to explore articulations of necropolitics, racialization, and counter-terrorism within an increasingly globalized trans movement. His work appears in Transgender Migrations: The Bodies, Borders, and Politics of Transition, The Transgender Studies Reader 2, Trans Studies Quarterly 4.1, The Journal of Gender Studies, Somatechnics, Canadian Ethnic Studies, Trans Lives in a Globalizing World, and The Equity Myth: Racialization and Indigeneity at Canadian Universities.

Please contact soc-anthro@carleton.ca for the Zoom link.

This lecture is part of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology Colloquium Series.