Tag: Nikhil Singh

Speaking events this spring

I’m doing a bunch of public events this semester. Here’s the schedule. On Tuesday, February 13, at 6 pm, I’ll be joining Ruthie Wilson Gilmore and Tom Sugrue on a panel about Nikhil Singh’s new book, Race and America’s Long War, which I highly recommend. Singh puts the current moment in a broad historical context, tracing Trump’s licensing of new states of cruelty back to the earliest days of America as a settler society. The book is full of surprises, which will shock even the most jaded observer of American life. The panel will be at NYU, 20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor. On Thursday, February 22, at 4:30 pm, I’ll be delivering the Oscar Jászi Memorial Lecture at Oberlin College. Jászi, […]

Local 33, Yale, and the Spirit of Conservatism

GESO, the graduate employees’ union at Yale, took a quantum leap forward this week when it was chartered as Local 33 of the UNITE-HERE international union. It now joins Yale’s two other unions: Local 34, the clerical and technical workers’ union, and Local 35, the service and maintenance workers’ union. Though Yale has yet to recognize Local 33, this is a big step. As the Washington Post reports: On Wednesday evening, something happened that generations of graduate students at Yale University had awaited for nearly two decades: The founding of a union. With about 1,500 members present, amidst New Haven’s other unions and with the support of a who’s who of Connecticut public officials, the international president of UNITE-HERE arrived to certify their […]

Settler Society, Global Empire: Aziz Rana and Nikhil Singh on the American State

Aziz Rana, who’s a professor of law at Cornell, is one of my favorite of the younger generation of political theorists who are transforming our understanding of some of the basic paradigms of political science. I discovered his work a few years ago, when I got a copy of his first book The Two Faces of Freedom. That book just came out in paperback. Since then, he’s been kind enough to share with me several chapters from his new project on a different tradition of American constitutionalism, one that we might call anti-constitutionalism or an alternative constitutionalism, that seeks to take down the text from its pedestal and put in its place, and that explores it came to its position […]

Clarence Thomas’s Counterrevolution

What follows is the talk I gave at the University of Washington this past weekend on my paper about Clarence Thomas: “Smiling Faces Tell Lies: Pessimism, Originalism, and Capitalism in the Jurisprudence of Clarence Thomas.” The paper is still incomplete. I only managed to write about Thomas’s theories of racism and how they intersect with his philosophy of constitutional interpretation. In the coming months, I intend to expand the paper to talk about Thomas’s views on capitalism, and how they inform his jurisprudence about the Commerce Clause, the Takings Clause, and more. Ultimately, this paper will be published by the University of Chicago Press in a volume on African-American political thought, edited by Melvin Rogers and Jack Turner. Other contributors […]