Lisa Lowe: "Ports, Archives, Museums"

color photograph of Lisa Lowe
Speaker: 
Lisa Lowe, Professor of English and American Studies, Tufts University
Event Date: 
March 24, 2016
Event Time: 
3:10pm to 5:00pm
Location: 
2239 Lane Hall
Event Accessibility : 
Ramp and elevator access at the E. Washington Street entrance (by the loading dock). There are accessible restrooms on the south end of Lane Hall, on each floor of the building. A gender neutral restroom is available on the first floor.
Event Tags: 
race colonialism & sexualities
color photograph of Lisa Lowe

This presentation explores methodological questions for the interdisciplinary scholar who interprets archival documents and material culture for the recovery of transhemispheric links between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Lisa Lowe is Professor of English and American Studies at Tufts University and author of the recent book, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke University Press, 2015). In this uniquely interdisciplinary work, Lisa Lowe examines the relationships between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries, exploring the links between colonialism, slavery, imperial trades and Western liberalism. Reading across archives, canons, and continents, Lowe connects the liberal narrative of freedom overcoming slavery to the expansion of Anglo-American empire, observing that abstract promises of freedom often obscure their embeddedness within colonial conditions. Race and social difference, Lowe contends, are enduring remainders of colonial processes through which “the human” is universalized and “freed” by liberal forms, while the peoples who create the conditions of possibility for that freedom are assimilated or forgotten. Analyzing the archive of liberalism alongside the colonial state archives from which it has been separated, Lowe offers new methods for interpreting the past, examining events well documented in archives, and those matters absent, whether actively suppressed or merely deemed insignificant. Lowe invents a mode of reading intimately, which defies accepted national boundaries and disrupts given chronologies, complicating our conceptions of history, politics, economics, and culture, and ultimately, knowledge itself.

Cosponsors: Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, Confucius Institute, Center for South Asian Studies, Department of American Culture, American Culture Graduate Program, Asian / Pacific Islander American Studies Program, Department of English