The W.L. Morton Lecture 2016
Dr. Audra Simpson, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University
The Architecture of “Consent” and the Anatomy of “Refusal”: Cases from North America and Australia
The talk will examine the ordered ghost of reason that shades notions of “consent” in historical cases from Indigenous North America and Australia with attention to the ways in which Indigenous life refused, did not consent to, and still refuses to be folded into a larger encompassing colonizing and settler colonial narratives of savagery, of failure, of diminishment. It is those narratives that inform the apprehension and at times, the ethnography and governance of Indigenous life and are pushed back upon in order to document, reread, theorize and enact ways out of the notion of a fixed past and settled present.
Audra Simpson is the author of Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Duke University Press, 2014), winner of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association’s Best First Book in Native American and Indigenous Studies Prize, the Laura Romero Prize from the American Studies Association as well as the Sharon Stephens Prize from the American Ethnological Society (2015). She is co-editor of Theorizing Native Studies (Duke University Press, 2014). She has articles in Theory & Event, Cultural Anthropology, American Quarterly, Junctures, Law and Contemporary Problems and Wicazo Sa Review. In 2010 she won Columbia University’s School for General Studies “Excellence in Teaching Award.” She is a Kahnawake Mohawk.
This free public event is presented by Canadian Studies & History Undergraduate Departments, the Frost Centre of Canadian Studies & Indigenous Studies, and Catherine Parr Traill College. The W.L. Morton Lecture is named in honour of W.L. Morton, the Canadian historian and former Master of Trent's Champlain College. All are welcome.
