
In this talk, Evelyn Nakano Glenn takes the British settler colonial origins of the U.S. seriously by arguing for its foundational importance and continuing significance in American political and social formations. The talk examines how American national identity, racial stratification, and central concepts such as sovereignty, citizenship, property, and freedom developed in the context of territorial expansion, encounters with indigenous others, reliance on chattel slavery, and mass immigration. Glenn pays particular attention to contradictions, silences, and amnesias, then turns to the question of present day xenophobia, which has risen in Western Europe and North America in response to the influx of refugees fleeing political war, hunger, and persecution in the Global South to ask the question: is there something distinct about U.S. xenophobia? If so, how might the differences be related to the U.S. settler colonial experience?
This event is cosponsored by the Immigration History Research Center, the Race, Indigeneity, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Intiative, the Center on Women, Gender, and Public Policy, the Human Rights Program, American Indian Studies, and the departments of Anthropology, Geography, History, Political Science and Political Psychology.
Evelyn Nakano Glenn is Professor of the Graduate School and Founding Director of the Center for Race and Gender at the University of California, Berkeley. Her teaching and research focus on the relations among race, gender, labor, and citizenship. Her articles have appeared in such journals as Social Problems, Signs, Feminist Studies, American Sociological Review, Stanford Law Review, Contemporary Sociology, and Gender and Society, as well as in many edited volumes. She is the author of Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America (Harvard University Press); Unequal Freedom, How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor (Harvard University Press); and Issei, Nisei, War Bride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service (Temple University Press). She is a past President of the American Sociological Association.