Regimes of Repair | Sonali Thakkar (NYU)

Join the English department’s From Margin to Center reading group for a talk with Sonali Thakkar (NYU) on February 5 at 5:30 PM in the Barker Room.  Abstract This talk maps key scenes in the history of racial repair from the early postwar period to the present. Thakkar’s focus is on identifying a postcolonial poetics and politics that resists what she calls regimes of repair–officially sanctioned and dominant institutions, technologies, and forms of knowledge production that regulate the material and political limits of repair and reparation in service of a colonial status quo. Thakkar will discuss anticolonial thinkers such as Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, whose ambivalence about reparation in the early postwar period signaled the centrality of racial reparation as a key question for the remaking of the postwar world order. What do their intuitions in the era of decolonization teach us in the present, at a time when the global reparations movement has achieved novel visibility and purchase, especially since the 2020 protests for racial justice and Black lives? She also pays particular attention to some of the fissures in reparations discourse that have manifested since the turn of the 21st century, when the demand for reparations for the Atlantic slave trade became a flashpoint at the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism, in part because of the alleged competition between the rights and reparations claims of different groups. How does reparation come to function as a strategy of divide and rule, and how might a postcolonial politics generate a different way of accounting for the past? About the speakerSonali Thakkar is associate professor of English at New York University, where she teaches postcolonial literature and theory, race and ethnic studies, critical human rights, and Jewish studies/Holocaust studies. Her first book, The Reeducation of Race: Jewishness and the Politics of Antiracism in Postcolonial Thought (Stanford University Press, 2023), reconstructs how postwar attempts to redefine the scientific and social scientific meaning of race at the UN and UNESCO contributed to making ideas about Jewishness and Jewish difference central to anticolonial and postcolonial discourse. Her current project, tentatively titled “Regimes of Repair,” investigates the organizing centrality of the reparative in contemporary postcolonial poetics and politics.