Remaindered Life
In Remaindered Life (Duke, 2022) Neferti X. M. Tadiar offers a new conceptual vocabulary and framework for rethinking the dynamics of a global capitalism maintained through permanent imperial war. Tracking how contemporary capitalist accumulation depends on producing life-times of disposability, Tadiar focuses on what she terms remaindered life—practices of living that exceed the distinction between life worth living and life worth expending. Through this heuristic, Tadiar reinterprets the global significance and genealogy of the surplus life-making practices of migrant domestic and service workers, refugees fleeing wars and environmental disasters, criminalized communities, urban slum dwellers, and dispossessed Indigenous people. She also examines artists and filmmakers in the Global South who render forms of various living in the midst of disposability. Retelling the story of globalization from the side of those who reach beyond dominant protocols of living, Tadiar demonstrates how attending to remaindered life can open up another horizon of possibility for a radical remaking of our present global mode of life.
About the Speakers
Neferti Xina M. Tadiar is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College. She is the author of: Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization (2009), and Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (2004), which was awarded the Philippine National Book Award in Cultural Criticism for 2005. She is also co-editor of Beyond the Frame: Women of Color and Visual Representation (with Angela Y. Davis). Professor Tadiar joined the faculty of Barnard in 2006, after teaching in the Department of History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz for nine years, and before that, at the University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines. Her academic interests include transnational and third world feminisms; postcolonial and Marxist theory; critical theories of race and subjectivity; literary and social theory; cultural studies of the Asia Pacific region; Southeast Asia and Philippine studies.
Erica Edwards is Professor of English and African American Studies at Yale University. Among other books, she is the author of The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of U.S. Empire (New York University Press, 2021; winner, American Studies Association John Hope Franklin Book Prize and honorable mention, MLA James Russell Lowell Prize), which offers an account of contemporary Black women’s culture and its entanglements with US imperialism.
Paul Nadal is Assistant Professor of English and American Studies and an associated faculty member of the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University. Nadal is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of literature and economy. His current book project looks at the relationship between novels and remittances in the Philippine diaspora, a chapter of which appeared in the September 2021 issue of American Quarterly and won the Best Essay Prize from the American Literature Society.
Jasbir K. Puar is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University. She is the author of the award-winning books The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity Disability (2017), which has been translated into Spanish and Portuguese, and Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007), available in French and Spanish, re-issued as an expanded version for its 10th anniversary (2017), and forthcoming in Greek and Portuguese. Her articles have been published in journals such as Social Text and South Atlantic Quarterly, mainstream venues such as Al-Jazeera and The Guardian, and translated into more than 15 languages. She is also co-author of exhibitions for the Sharjah Architecture Triennial (2019) and the Sharjah Art Biennial (2023). She is the recipient of the 2019 Kessler Award from the Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies (CLAGS) at CUNY, which recognizes lifetime achievement in and impact on queer research and organizing.
Accessibility
The venue is accessible to people with mobility disabilities. For additional accessibility needs please email skreitzb@barnard.edu.
This is an in-person event, free and open to all. Please review our COVID safety guidelines. Registration is preferred.