Brown Bag Biography: Patricia Hilden

February 6, 12:00pm - 1:15pm
Mānoa Campus, Kuykendall 409A Add to Calendar

Cannibal Time: Invasion, Conquest, Incarceration, a pocket book for Africa World Press, begins with the earliest days of European invasion, tying our current world of mass incarceration, with its mechanisms of exclusion and control, into the history of what became the United States. The two foundational histories, of invasion and conquest of Indigenous North America and the enslavement of first Indians and then Africans, depended upon the carceral regime carried by Europeans into North America and subsequently across the Pacific. Across the centuries, the descendants of both Africans and Native Americans created a vibrant resistance, despite the Europeans’ best efforts to impose a carceral, capitalist regime across the US empire.

This talk highlights the key landmarks of the book, from “our” national origin myth’s beginnings in colonial New England, through the centuries of enslavement, dispossession, forced assimilation, and formal incarceration, including in prisons and workhouses, on reservations, and in the boarding schools created first for Native Americans (and Kanaka Maoli in the early 19th century) and extended to children of African descent after the Civil War, when the white U.S.’s Jim Crow system continued to spread the geographies of carcerality across the country. The criminalization of other racialized communities, particularly those coming from Asia, continued, culminating both in restrictive laws - and, for Chinese immigrants, incarceration on Angel Island - and in the incarceration of people of Japanese descent, some on Indian reservations, during WWII. The talk ends in the present, when ICE cages continue to house white America’s “unwanted”, many of them descendants of those Indigenous people colonized by Europeans other than the English.

Prof. Hilden, who is professor emerita of Native American Studies and Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and currently a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Ethnic Studies here, has published four books and is finishing the short book she will be describing today, Cannibal Time: Invasion, Conquest, Incarceration. Her most recently completed piece, Tim:pni’it: Stories of Space, of Surveillance, of Time, is a contribution to the forthcoming collection, Ng?g? in the American Imperium, which is edited by Timothy Reiss, and includes essays by University of Hawai?i faculty, Noenoe Silva and Haunani Kay Trask.


Event Sponsor
The Center for Biographical Research, Mānoa Campus

More Information
Zoë E. Sprott, (808) 956-3774, gabiog@hawaii.edu, http://blog.hawaii.edu/cbrhawaii/, Brown Bag Biography - Hilden (PDF)

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