Modern state formation has created, with much fanfare,
populations who claim to be sovereign and free by virtue of their national belonging. Over and over again, this process has also created, which much less fanfare, generally racialized peoples whom it attempts to deny political agency and to treat as effectively non-sovereign. These peoples are exposed, differentially, to unnatural death in its various forms: the sovereign power to take life, the sovereign prerogative to let die, slow violence, social death, etc. Though this logic—the creation of sovereign populations whose political and economic security appears to depend on the inverse creation of non-sovereign peoples—is paradigmatically colonial, it has become even more world-encompassing in recent decades than it was during the colonial era.
   Using the work of legal scholars, political theorists, and anthropologists, this talk offers three ways to think about how textual study has itself been implicated in the creation of sovereign and non-sovereign people, in this not merely colonial but ultimately genocidal dynamic. The conclusion to this talk points toward a critical method that would instead resist this logic. Such a method would no longer simply turn written texts, cultural traditions, and historical periods into the reified objects of scholarly knowledge, into things scholars may claim to know. As we shall see, that transformation is a distinctive feature of colonial modernity.

Siraj AHMED is Professor of English and a member of the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the CUNY Graduate Center, New York. He is the author of The Stillbirth of Capital: Enlightenment Writing and Colonial India (Stanford University Press, 2012) and The Archaeology of Babel: The Colonial Foundation of the Humanities (Stanford University Press, 2018), which received MLA’s Scaglione Prize for best book in comparative literature. His work has appeared in Critical Inquiry, Representations, MLQ, Cultural Critique, Nineteenth-Century Literature, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere, South Asia, The Postcolonial Enlightenment (Oxford University Press, 2009) and A Companion to Literary Theory (Blackwell, 2018), among other publications. He has held multiple fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and others from the Mellon and the Whiting Foundations, the Huntington and the Clark Libraries, and the University of London Institutes of English and of Commonwealth Studies. He received his B.A. in English and Philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania and his Ph.D. in English & Comparative Literature from Columbia University