Williams professor edits symposium on Trayvon Martin killing
WILLIAMSTOWN – Neil Roberts, assistant professor of Africana studies and faculty affiliate in political science at Williams College, has guest edited a symposium in the journal Theory & Event, published in September by The Johns Hopkins University Press.
The symposium features eight essays on what Roberts calls the “Trayvon Martin event.”
“An event differs from a tragedy,” Prof. Roberts said. “A tragedy entails a plot, set of actions, and conclusion, often foreclosed and backward-looking. An event is an occurrence mutually reinforced by past actions and future outlooks, conversations, and prognostications on what we must do to decipher its meaning in its wake. The shooting of 17-year-old Martin is no different.”
Prof. Roberts clusters the essays into three groups. The first, he explains, explores issues of publicity, racial violence, jurisprudence and the rationalizations of acts conducted by private citizens. The second delves into existential questions of race, and the third examines what is required for transformation in American race relations to occur.
Essays include “Deadly Force and Public Reason” by Anna Marie Smith, professor of government at Cornell University; “Trayvon Martin, Intersectionality, and the Politics of Disgust” by Ange-Marie Hancock, associate professor of political science and gender studies at the University of Southern California; and “Stuff White People Know (or: What We Talk About When We Talk About Trayvon)” by Mark Reinhardt, Williams College Class of 1956 Professor of American Civilization.
“My core assumption in the paper is that white supremacy continues to be a fundamental political fact in the U.S., albeit one whose form has mutated in such a way that most white people deny, and probably do not believe, that it continues,” Prof. Reinhardt said.
The symposium is available online at Project Muse, a database of academic journals, and can be accessed at muse.jhu.edu/journals/
Posted by Catherine M. Krummey
on September 6, 2012. Filed under Education News,News.
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