Democracy and the Problem of Political Loss
Abstract: Loss has been front and centre in US politics recently, and especially in diagnoses about the health of US democracy. On the one hand the months-long refusal of Donald Trump and his supporters to accept their loss in the 2020 election—which culminated in the violent attempted insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021—has led many to begin grappling with the dangers a politics of white grievance poses for the prospects of multiracial democracy. Simultaneously the continued demands for racial justice amid a deadly pandemic that has disproportionately affected people of colour and the key role of black activists in the electoral defeat of racist right-wing forces in the 2020 election highlight the continued demands placed on black citizens. In this talk, I explore the experience of political loss, its role in democratic politics and the way it has been understood by political theorists.
Dr. Juliet Hooker
Bio: Juliet Hooker is Professor of Political Science at Brown University. She is a political theorist specializing in racial justice, multiculturalism, Latin American political thought, and Black political thought. Her publications include: Race and the Politics of Solidarity (Oxford, 2009) and Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos (Oxford, 2017), which was a recipient of the American Political Science Association’s 2018 Ralph Bunche Book Award for the best work in ethnic and cultural pluralism and the 2018 Best Book Award of the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. She is currently working on a book project entitled, Black Grief/White Grievance, that explores the role of loss in contemporary racial politics in the United States. Prof. Hooker served as co-Chair of the American Political Science Association’s Presidential Task Force on Racial and Social Class Inequalities in the Americas (2014-2015), and as Associate Director of the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin (2009-2014). She has been the recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the DuBois Institute for African American Research at Harvard, and the Advanced Research Collaborative at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.