Lecture: Dr. Chandan Reddy

Lecture by Dr. Chandan Reddy, Associate Professor of English at University of Washington

In this talk Dr. Reddy extends his discussion of the importance of sexuality and racial violence in the making and unmaking of modern U.S. society found in his recent book, Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality and the U.S. State. By focusing and deepening his discussion of the "racial state," Reddy offers a critique of liberal, leftist and Marxist theories of modern violence. Instead, Reddy argues that queer of color critique might be one critical terrain by which to develop an adequate critique of violence for our current times. Any such critique, he argues, is driven by the need to imagine a politics where violence no longer has both the first and last "word."