Colonial Domesticity and Social Reproduction

This lecture considers the centrality of forms of domesticity, such as family, kinship, and schooling, to the social reproduction of colonialism and racial capitalism in the United States. Colonial and capitalist social relations are materially reproduced through feminized care work, household, and biological labor. While homes and households are primary sites for the invisible and mostly unwaged labors of colonized, racialized, and immigrant women that reproduce human being, social reproduction takes place on plantations, in schools, factories, on assembly lines, in hospitals and prisons and in other institutions, at both intimate and global scales.

Speaker’s bio:

Lisa Lowe is Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies at Yale University, and an affiliate faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration. An interdisciplinary scholar whose work is concerned with the analysis of race, immigration, capitalism, and colonialism, she is the author of Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Cornell University Press, 1991), Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Duke UP, 1996), and The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke UP, 2015), and the co-editor of The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Duke UP, 1997). She is currently working on a book titled A Colonial History of the Present.

Chair: Takashi Fujitani (Dr. David Chu Chair in Asia-Pacific Studies, Professor of History, and Director of the Dr. David Chu Program in Asia-Pacific Studies)

Organized by the Dr. David Chu Program in Asia-Pacific Studies and co-sponsored by the Women & Gender Studies Institute and the Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies, University of Toronto

The talk will be followed by a reception