Knowing the Other: Politics of Race/Gender Passing, Black Freedom, and Native Sovereignty


 African American Studies     Feb 14 2018 | 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM HIB 135

Sandra Harvey, Ph.D.
Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Criminology, Law & Society
Department of African American Studies
HIB 135
4-5:30PM on Wednesday, February 14, 2018.
Co-sponsored by the Department of African American Studies and the School of Humanities

In this presentation, Harvey reviews the testimony of supposedly Black applicants for enrollment into
the Choctaw nation, and addresses the claim that Black Natives are not “really” Native as part of a
larger narrative on race/gender passing. She offers a speculative analysis of the applicants’ testimony
as an assertion that their relationships to the land, and each other, moved beyond settler colonial
epistemologies of knowing, and the sort of sovereignty that these epistemologies promise.