Identity, Justice, and the Future of “Race”

Barbara Fields and Derik Smith

From the 2021-2022 Online Speaker Series: Identity and Belonging in a Global Age. Other events in this series.

Barbara J. Fields

Professor in the Department of History at Columbia University. She is author of Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (1985) and co-author of Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (2012).

Derik Smith

Associate Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College. He is author of Robert Hayden in Verse: New Histories of African American Poetry and the Black Arts Era (2018).

2021-2022 Online Speaker Series

Identity and Belonging in a Global Age

With the rise of tribalism and nationalism throughout the world, questions of collective identity and belonging have surged to prominence in recent years. Across numerous disciplines and discourses, a key dilemma has taken shape: how to reconcile the legitimate yearning for rootedness and locality, with the fluidity and porousness of an increasingly global age. This series brings together leading thinkers from a variety of perspectives to examine and reframe the crises of identity that confront us in a rapidly changing global age, and to think deeply about how humanity might resolve them. Sponsored by the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University, and COMIT.

Cornel West, Achille Mbembe, Barbara J. Fields, Craig Calhoun, Juliet Hooker, Akeel Bilgrami, Arturo Escobar, Inés Valdez, Glen Coulthard, Or Rosenboim, Derik Smith, Samuel Moyn, David A. Palmer

Other events in this series