2018 ICSI Public Lecture: Jean & John Comaroff - Interrogating the Global Dis/Order

The Institute for Critical Social Inquiry will open part of its programming to the public – a series of lectures taught by this Summer's faculty cohort of Richard J. Bernstein (NSSR), Nilüfer Göle (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales), and Jean and John Comaroff (Harvard University).

Jean and John Comaroff's lecture is entitled "Crime, Sovereignty, and the State: the Metaphysics of Global Disorder."

“The Global South” has become a shorthand for the universe of non-European, postcolonial peoples; it is that half of the planet about which, conventionally, the “Global North” spins theories. Rarely is it seen as a source of explanations for world historical processes, past or present, let alone as the source of those processes. Yet, as much of the northern hemisphere experiences increasing fiscal inscrutability and rising inequality, state privatization, crime and corruption, ethnic conflict, authoritarian populism, and other “crises,” it looks as though it is evolving southward, so to speak. Is this so? Might the relation of “north” and “south” be more a matter of complementary inequity, more a construct of the dialectical imagination, than a hard-and-fast empirical reality? In this seminar, we shall reverse the usual order of things, addressing a range of familiar themes in order to theorize them anew from the “eccentric location” of the “south,” broadly conceived: among those themes, neoliberalism and its futures; the changing relations among capital, the state and governance; democracy, authoritarian populism, and new forms of political life; the fetishism of the law and the judicialization of the public sphere; the paradoxes of twenty-first century nationhood and its jurisdictions; new magical economies; the crisis of liberalism; the meaning of crime and the metaphysics of disorder; and the present and future political economy of identity. This re-imagining of the contemporary global dis/order renders key problems of our time at once strange and familiar, giving an ironic twist to the evolutionary pathways long assumed by social scientists.

Jean Comaroff is the Alfred North Whitehead Professor of African and African American Studies and Anthropology, and Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town.

John Comaroff is Hugh K. Foster Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology at Harvard University, He is also Oppenheimer Research Fellow in African Studies at Harvard, an Honorary Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cape Town and an Affiliated Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation.

About the Institute:
The Institute for Critical Social Inquiry (ICSI) is designed to provide advanced graduate students and junior faculty from around the world with the opportunity to spend one week at the New School’s campus in Greenwich Village working closely with some of the most distinguished thinkers shaping the course of contemporary social inquiry. Each of these scholars will teach a week-long seminar on a foundational thinker or topic of contemporary concern in a series of hands-on, intensive, and intimate sessions.

Location:
Johnson/Kaplan Auditorium
63 5th Ave, New York, NY
Wednesday, June 13, 2018 at 5:30 pm