MI organises online lecture by University of British Columbia Professor Denise Ferreira da Silva on “Unpayable Debt”
New Delhi. : The Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI), organized the twenty third lecture of the Distinguished Lecture Series “Unpayable Debt “ by Prof. Denise Ferreira da Silva, Professor and Director of the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver and a Visiting Professor at the School of Law at Birkbeck, University of London, on Friday, 12th August, 2022, 8:30-9:30 PM IST on Zoom.
Supported by the Scheme for Promotion of Academic and Research Collaboration (SPARC), Ministry of Education, Government of India, the talk was organized as part of the ongoing academic collaboration with the Department of English and American Studies, University of Würzburg, Germany, and promises to be one in a line of successively pertinent lectures.
The talk was conducted by, Ms. Zahra Rizvi and Ms. Suman Bhagchandani, Ph.D.
scholars, Department of English, JMI, and was enthusiastically attended by a large number of scholars, students, and faculty from all over the world and across various time-zones.
Prof. Simi Malhotra, HoD., Department of English, JMI, Indian PI, delivered the
welcome address, greeting the invited speaker, faculty, scholars, and students. She first talked about the lecture series and then introduced the esteemed speaker, Prof Denise Ferreira da Silva, who was greeted by a round of applause.
Prof Denise Ferreira da Silva’s lecture drew key arguments of what she calls a
“dialectical image” from her recent work Unpayable Debt. Beginning with an analysis of Kindred by Octavia E. Butler, Prof Ferreira da Silva explored the correlation between raciality, coloniality and the juridical-economic matrix of capital, and argued against the modern onto-epistemological pillars of separability, determinacy, separability.
Further, the lecture presented the economic and ethical notions of value in relation to global capital and its inseparability from violence employed in the modern colony. Global capital was subsequently reformulated as the total value expropriated from slave labour and native lands.
This was followed by an engaging, in-depth Q/A session coordinated by Ms. Ann Susan Aleyas, Ph.D. Scholar, Department of English, JMI. The event was brought to an end with a Vote of Thanks by Ms. Zahra Rizvi.
To ensure a wide range of viewership and participation, the event was also live
streamed on YouTube, and was attended by over a hundred participants.
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