In Fall 2021, the Gender Institute established a book launch series called “New Books, New Feminist Directions,” in which faculty can share and discuss their recent monographs with UB’s Gender Institute community, as well as the wider virtual community. These hybrid events will include a guest commentator who will discuss the significance of the book and its relevance for the field. This series highlights the superb feminist scholarship at UB, while also celebrating a colleague’s achievement.
Thursday, March 6, 2025
12:00 - 1:00pm (ET)
via Zoom
What if we understood the idea of family as central to representing alternative forms of governance as expressions of racial deviance? In The Politics of Kinship, Mark Rifkin shows how ideologies of family, including notions of kinship, recast Indigenous and other forms of collective self-organization and self-determination as disruptive racial tendencies in need of state containment and intervention. Centering work in Indigenous studies, Rifkin illustrates how conceptions of family and race work together as part of ongoing efforts to regulate, assault, and efface other political orders. The book examines the history of anthropology and its resonances in contemporary queer scholarship, contemporary Indian policy from the 1970s onward, the legal history of family formation and privacy in the United States, and the association of blackness with criminality across US history. In this way, Rifkin seeks to open new possibilities for envisioning what kinds of relations, networks, and formations can and should be seen as governance on lands claimed by the United States.
Mark Rifkin is Professor of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the Â鶹´«Ã½o. He is the author of eight books, including The Politics of Kinship: Race, Family, Governance; Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination; and When Did Indians Become Straight?: Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty. His work has won national awards, such as the John Hope Franklin prize for Best Book in American Studies, and he has served as president of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association.
Charlene A. Carruthers (she/her) is a writer, filmmaker, community organizer, and Black Studies PhD Candidate at Northwestern University. A practitioner of telling more complete stories, her work interrogates historical conjunctures of Black freedom-making post-emancipation and decolonial revolution, Black governance, Black/Native/Indigenous relationalities, and Black feminist abolitionist geographies. Her work spans more than 20 years of community organizing across racial, gender, and economic justice movements. She served as the founding national director of BYP100 (Black Youth Project 100), and is author of the bestselling book, Unapologetic: A Black, Queer and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements.