Visiting Hurst Professor Lisa Lowe gives a talk

“Metaphors of Migration” 

This lecture considers the dilemmas of representing migration. Whether as foreign threat or abject victim, the state produces "the migrant" as the limit of national sovereignty, social order, and liberal personhood, even as it seeks to translate the “migrant" into the “immigrant" through regimes of visibility, legality, and temporality in the political sphere, laying claim to migrant life in the economic sphere, and subjecting what remains to humanist concepts of free will and autonomy. 

Lisa Lowe is Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies at Yale University. An interdisciplinary scholar whose work is concerned with the analysis of race, immigration, capitalism, and colonialism, she is the author of Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Cornell University Press, 1991), Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Duke University Press, 1996), and The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke University Press, 2015), and the co-editor of The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Duke University Press, 1997) and New Questions, New Formations: Asian American Studies, a special issue of positions: east asia cultures critique 5:2 (Fall 1997). Before joining Yale, Lowe taught at the University of California, San Diego and Tufts University. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Mellon Foundations, the School of Advanced Study at the University of London, the UC Humanities Research Institute, and the American Council of Learned Societies.