Ronak Kapadia
Assistant Professor in Gender and Women’s Studies
Affiliated faculty in Global Asian Studies and Museum and Exhibition Studies
University of Illinois, Chicago
Keynote Abstract:
This keynote advances queer, feminist, anti-colonial, and indigenous modes of thinking about the futures of Palestine at the borderlands of US empire. Kapadia argues that a queer feminist analysis of visionary aesthetics in the work of London-based Palestinian visual artist Larissa Sansour provides an alternate lens through which to understand the “facts-on-the-ground” of contemporary US/Israeli security policing and counterinsurgency warfare in Palestine. By closely reading her science fiction film trilogy series as a form of knowledge and critique, Kapadia questions what speculative architecture, outer space, and Arab futurisms together might yield for thinking Palestinian liberation and indigenous sovereignty otherwise. This talk further probes the speculative frontiers of US empire and its forever wars of security and counterterrorism.
Ronak K. Kapadia is Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and affiliated faculty in Global Asian Studies and Museum & Exhibition Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. A cultural theorist of race, security, sensation, and empire in the late 20th and early 21st century United States, Kapadia is completing a book about the interface between contemporary visual art and aesthetics and US global counterinsurgency warfare in South Asia and the Middle East titled Insurgent Aesthetics of the Forever War: Art and Performance after 9/11 (under contract, Duke University Press). With Katherine McKittrick and Simone Browne, he is co-editor of the 2017 special issue of Surveillance and Society on race and surveillance. His writing also appears or is forthcoming in Asian American Literary Review, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Feminist Formations, Women & Performance, and edited volumes including: Shifting Borders: America and the Middle East/North Africa, Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader, and With Stones in Our Hands: Reflections on Racism, Muslims and US Empire. Kapadia has begun research toward his second book project, The Downward Redistribution of Breath, which develops a critical feminist theory of healing justice in the time of imperial decline.
(B)orders of Empire 