Feb
29
12:30am
Capitalist Humanitarianism: Lucia Hulsether in conversation with Emily Owens
By Charis Books and More/Charis Circle
Charis and The Agnes Scott College Department of Religious Studies welcome Lucia Hulsether, a graduate of Agnes Scott College, in conversation with Emily Owens for a discussion of Capitalist Humanitarianism.
The struggle against neoliberal order has gained momentum over the last five decades---to the point that economic elites have not only adapted to the Left's critiques but incorporated them for capitalist expansion. Venture funds expose their ties to slavery and pledge to invest in racial equity. Banks pitch microloans as a path to indigenous self-determination. Fair-trade brands narrate consumption as an act of feminist solidarity with women artisans in the global South. In Capitalist Humanitarianism Lucia Hulsether examines these projects and the contexts of their emergence. Blending historical and ethnographic styles, and traversing intimate and global scales, Hulsether tracks how neoliberal self-critique creates new institutional hegemonies that, in turn, reproduce racial and neocolonial dispossession. From the archives of Christian fair traders to luxury social entrepreneurship conferences, from US finance offices to Guatemalan towns flooded with their loan products, from service economy desperation to the internal contradictions of social movements, Hulsether argues that capitalist humanitarian projects are fueled as much by a profit motive as by a hope that racial capitalism can redeem the losses that accumulate in its wake.
Lucia Hulsether is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College. She has broad interests in religion, culture, and politics in the Americas, with primary intellectual commitments to feminist/queer theory, critical race and ethnic studies, and the histories of social movements. Her first book Capitalist Humanitarianism (Duke University Press, 2023) explores the historical interplay between twentieth century left/socialist organizing and neoliberal projects to make free markets “ethical” with respect to the racialized and feminized populations that they dispossess.
Emily Owens is the David and Michelle Ebersman Assistant Professor of History at Brown University, where she teaches about histories of race, gender, and sexuality in the US. She researches US slavery, the legal history of race and sexual violence, and the intellectual history of American feminisms. She also writes histories of the present that explore how structural racism and misogyny get expressed in ordinary life. She is the author of Consent in the Presence of Force: Sexual Violence and Black Women's Survival in Antebellum New Orleans (University of North Carolina Press, 2023).
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Charis Books and More/Charis Circle
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