Seminar with Prof. Vasuki Nesiah (NYU)

“We are proud to apologize for genocide”: The racial investment in humanitarian capital”

At this seminar, Vasuki will discuss aspects of her current book project on international law’s complicity with colonialism and slavery. The title of this talk is a nod to Jackie Sibblies Drury’s play, “We are proud to present a presentation…”; it is structured as a rehearsal of a play about the German genocide against the Herero people of Namibia. This structure echoes the familiar discussion of the genocide against the Herero and Nama peoples as a rehearsal for the holocaust. From Aime Cesair to Hannah Arendt, there is a long history of preoccupation with this relationship and the boomerang effect of genocide in the colonies and genocide in Europe. Questions of precedents and rehearsals have their own genealogy in international law and treatment of events in Europe to define the meaning of events in the colonial theater is neither unprecedented or unrehearsed.  Preoccupied by these questions, this talk analyzes the law and policy debate over reparations for the genocides against the Herero and Nama communities, and for the distributive legacies of settler colonialism in Namibia. The vexed history of recognition of colonial Germany’s crimes, opens a window into the dominant framework of genocide in international law, including its relationship to the structures of accumulation and dispossession that were central to the colonization of indigenous peoples. Is international law’s framing of the crime of genocide evidence of international law’s repudiation of racism, or of the racial logics built into that framing?

Vasuki Nesiah teaches human rights, legal and social theory at NYU Gallatin where she is also faculty director of the Gallatin Global Fellowship in Human Rights. She has published on the history and politics of human rights, humanitarianism, international criminal law, reparations, global feminisims, and decolonization. Nesiah was awarded the Jacob Javits Professorship (2022),  Gallatin Distinguished Teacher Award in 2021 and the NYU Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Faculty Award in 2020. Her current book projects include International Conflict Feminism (forthcoming from University of Pennsylvania Press) and Reading the Ruins: Colonialism, Slavery, and International Law. A founding member of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL),  she is also co-editing TWAIL: A Handbook with Anthony Anghie, Bhupinder Chimni, Michael Fakhri, and Karin Mickelson (forthcoming from Elgar).

See Professor Vasuki Nesiah’s Faculty profile here!

Registration

Please register here - no later than Tuesday 14 November 12:00. Please note there is no more than 20 seats available. 

Please contact Associate Professor Miriam Cullen (miriam.cullen@jur.ku.dk) for any requires.