Noor Cultural Centre
    

Lecture | Dr. Deepa Kumar – The Production of the Racialized Terrorist Threat

Nov 7th 2017

Terrorcraft: The Production of the Racialized Terrorist Threat in the United States
by Professor Deepa Kumar

Noor is pleased to be co-sponsoring this lecture organized by the Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto.

Lecture Abstract
In their path breaking work, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, Barbara and Karen Fields (2012) argue that racism today is driven by a logic similar to that of witchcraft. Much like witchcraft, ‘racecraft’ is a set of practices that depict imagined and ideological constructs as real, and even natural, phenomena. Drawing on this concept, Professor Kumar contends that a particular form of racecraft, one which centres the Arab/Muslim terrorist, has emerged in the United States over the course of the last four decades. She builds on recent scholarship on empire and culture that understands imperialism as both an international and domestic process, by arguing that ‘terrorcraft’, an ideological framework that rests on the production of a global racialized terrorist threat, emerges from the US’s particular role on the global stage and in relation to regimes of domestic racial control. She further contends that ‘terrorcraft’ is sustained by real life events such as terrorist attacks in the West, and through the repetition of individual, state-initiated, and media-produced rituals. The result is that even though the likelihood of dying from a terrorist attack is miniscule, the majority of US citizens believe that terrorism poses a critical threat to their safety and security.

Dr. Deepa Kumar is an Associate Professor of Media Studies at Rutgers University. She is the recipient of the Dallas Smythe award for her engaged scholarship, and the Georgina Smith award for her work on gender and race equity.  She is the author of Outside the Box: Corporate Media, Globalization and the UPS Strike – about the power of the U.S. working class in challenging the priorities of neoliberalism; and Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire – which examines the production of the ‘Muslim enemy’ in the War on Terror.  Professor Kumar is currently working on a third book, about the cultural politics of the US national security state from the Cold War to the War on Terror – paying heed to how gender, race, and class intersect in the reproduction of imperial structures.

Date: Monday November 27, 2017
Time: 2-4 pm
Location: Room 246, University of Toronto Anthropology Building (19 Russell Street, Toronto)
Admission:  Free; click here to register

 

Event host: University of Toronto’s Department of Anthropology
Co-sponsors: University of Toronto’s Emmanuel College; University of Toronto’s Institute of Islamic Studies; Noor Cultural Centre






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