Audra Simpson to speak in Anthropology Colloquium "Occupying Selves"

Colloquium for the Department of Anthropology at University of Pennsylvania

Audra Simpson (Columbia University) will be colloquium speaker on  March 24, 

How has trauma has come to operate as a claim in the making of oneself? How is this element of one’s familial past been operationalized by now exposed “ethnic frauds” or so-called “pretendians”? What is the narrational and experiential raw material that constitutes a self that must be and therefore is settled and in this, defined definitively as a Native person? Emerging as a near sociological fact, the snippets and narratives of now-exposed fakes tend to a claim of trauma rather than relation. These claims fly in the face of Native modes of relationship to land, families or political orders and undermine Indigenous systems of descent and governance systems while claiming, obliquely, gesturally, to accord to them. What are the conditions that make for this imagining, this fantasy or rather, demand of a new start point and constitution of selfhood? This paper examines the invocation as trauma in the biographical accounts of well-known frauds to analyze both the content of their story of self-making but also the its imbrications with race and gender as features of a settler colonial society that no longer only claims lands, but also claims selves, and historical experiences as their own.

Light lunch served at 11:50.