All Events

What happens when 125,000 Chinese indentured men and enslaved African men and women work side by side on Cuban sugar plantations in the late nineteenth century? Nowhere else in history did these groups of unfree laborers meet in the same time and place. This unique encounter raises questions about race, class, and gender: Were the Chinese considered black or white, slave or free? How did the absence of Chinese women shape relations between Asians and Africans? Ultimately, were the Chinese “coolies” slaves like their black co-workers, or did they move toward freedom? This lecture explores these questions through key Cuban archival documents.

How does statelessness turn people into ‘bare’ or even ‘subhuman’ life? This upcoming lecture with Nasir Uddin, argues that the shift from statelessness to refugeehood is not linear but mediated by extreme violence, using the Rohingya as a case study. Drawing on the 2017 genocidal violence in Myanmar and its aftermath, it shows how the Rohingya, denied citizenship by Myanmar and recognition by Bangladesh, now live in conditions of protracted displacement, insecurity, and exclusion in Bangladesh’s borderlands, exemplifying life treated as less than human.