Women and Gender Studies InstituteWomen and Gender Studies Institute
Title: The Interminable Catastrophe
Dr. Bedour Alagraa is Assistant Professor of Political and Social Thought in the Department of African and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Alagraa received her PhD from the department of Africana Studies at Brown University in the Spring of 2019, and was an Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Fellow during her time at Brown. She also holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Toronto, and a Masters in Race, Ethnicity, and Post-Colonial Studies from the London School of Economics. Her book manuscript is entitled The Interminable Catastrophe: Fatal Liberalisms, Plantation Logics, and Black Political Life in the Wake of Disaster, and charts a conceptual history of catastrophe as a political category/concept (rather than Event), via its inauguration in early modern natural science and empiricist debates, and subsequent crystallization as a concept on the plantation. More specifically, her manuscript explores modern-day ecological catastrophes against the discourse of imminent disaster and anthropocene studies and instead, considers these occurrences as expressions of the durability of plantation modes of social relations, rendering them political conjunctures rather than ecological Events. More broadly, she is interested in Black Political Thought, especially Caribbean political thought, African anti-colonial thought, and Black Marxism(s). Bedour has been published in several journals, including Critical Ethnic Studies, Contemporary Political Theory, The CLR James Journal of Caribbean Philosophy, and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society. She is the co-editor of a volume on Black Political Thought, forthcoming from Pluto Press, and recently completed work on archiving Sylvia Wynter’s literary and academic works. Bedour is also co-editor, alongside Anthony Bogues, of the ‘Black Critique’ book series at Pluto Press, and is currently working on an edited volume of Sylvia Wynter’s unpublished essays.