Indigenous Elders, Decolonial Futures
Sandy Grande (Professor, Political Science & NAIS, UConn)
with a response by Joseph Darda (English, Texas Christian University)
Wednesday, February 22, 2023, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)
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The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.
In this talk, Prof. Sandy Grande troubles the prevailing narrative of global aging as a crisis wherein older adults are conceived as a threat to current systems of governance and infrastructure. Against this narrative she asks: What if instead of crisis, we imagine global aging as a condition of possibility? More specifically, her work considers the rising tide of older adults as providing a portal for reconsidering some of the central dichotomies and contradictions of a settler society built on the exigencies of capital: the conflation of work with existence; the tying of economic growth to production; the limiting of production to wage labor; and association of old age with declining yield. In this work, she centers Indigenous Elders as both subject and analytic, considering how they intervene in and ‘refuse’ the dominant formulations of aging. Her central claim is that Elder ways of being and knowing will become increasingly important as we conceptualize the end of settler hegemony and the possibilities of decolonial futures.
Sandy Grande is a Professor of Political Science and Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Connecticut with affiliations in American Studies, Philosophy, and the Race, Ethnicity and Politics program. Her research and teaching interfaces Native American and Indigenous Studies with critical theory toward the development of more nuanced analyses of the colonial present. She was recently awarded the Ford Foundation, Senior Fellowship (2019–2020) for a project on Indigenous Elders and aging. Her book, Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought was published in a 10th anniversary edition and a Portuguese translation is anticipated to be published in Brazil in 2023.
Joseph Darda is an associate professor of literature at Texas Christian University and the author of three books on the cultural life of race in the United States: The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism (Stanford, 2022), How White Men Won the Culture Wars (California, 2021), and Empire of Defense (Chicago, 2019). He has published articles in American Literary History, American Literature, American Quarterly, and Critical Inquiry, among other journals, and contributed essays to the Los Angeles Review of Books. With the historian Amira Rose Davis, he is coediting a forthcoming special issue of American Quarterly titled “The Body Issue: Sports and the Politics of Embodiment.”
Access note
If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.
