In light of the forced reproductive labor of enslaved women, Native girls in domestic work in settler households, and the contemporary transnational concentration of women in and from the Global South in care labor, “colonial domesticity” names an ongoing division of labor by which racialized colonized women perform the labor of reproducing the human species in a social order sorted into categories of difference. This lecture examines literary and historical narratives to elaborate “colonial domesticity,” and the centrality of kinship, family, and household organization to both the governance of colonized peoples, and to the maintenance and reproduction of racial colonial social relations.

Lisa Lowe is the Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies at Yale, and affiliate faculty in the programs in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies programs. 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.

Sponsored by Women, Feminist, and Queer Studies and co-sponsored by the Philosophy Department, Sociology Department, American Studies Program, Asian Studies Program, and Africana Studies Program.

Campus community only, please.