Dr. Elizabeth Seale, from the Sociology department, delves into her latest publication, Understanding Poverty: A Relational Approach. In her presentation, Dr. Seale explores her motivations behind writing the book, elucidates various forms of poverty, examines poverty as a social relation, and addresses its implications. She sheds light on the pervasive misconceptions surrounding economic adversity and its origins, particularly emphasizing the daily struggles faced by those living in poverty.

Dr. Matthew Unangst of the History department uses excerpts from his new book to illustrate the ways in which Europeans combined ideas about race and geography to establish and justify colonialism in Africa. The book, Colonial Geography: Race and Space in German East Africa, 1884-1905, charts changes in conceptions of the relationship between people and landscapes in mainland Tanzania during the German colonial period. In German minds, colonial development would depend on the relationship between East Africans and the landscape. The book argues that the most important element in German imperialism was not its violence but its attempts to apply racial thinking to the mastery and control of space. Utilizing approaches drawn from critical geography, Colonial Geography posits that the development of a representational space of empire had serious consequences for German colonialism and the population of East Africa. In this lecture, Dr. Unangst demonstrates how spatial thinking shaped ideas about race and colonialism in the period of New Imperialism for all European empires, not just Germany.

Dr. Fieni will present selections from his book, Decadent Orientalisms: The Decay of Colonial Modernity, which explores how literature in French and Arabic has imagined the relative health and morbidity of France and the Arab World since the mid-19th century. Attentive to historical and literary configurations of language, race, religion, and power, Decadent Orientalisms shows the importance of understanding Western discourses of Eastern decline together with Arab and Islamic responses in which decadence returns as a characteristic of the West. The lecture will range from a discussion of a scandalously carnivalesque Arabic text from 1855 by the Lebanese author Faris Ahmed al-Shidyaq to contemporary writing in French by Arab immigrants in Paris exorcising the specters of their own supposedly “degenerate” status.