The UBC Department of History is pleased to invite you to this year’s 9th Annual Burge Lecture “Savage States: Settler Governance in an Age of Sorrow” with guest lecturer Dr. Audra Simpson, Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University.
Organized by the UBC History Graduate Student Association, the Burge Lecture is an annual endowed lecture made possible by a generous donation from UBC alumnus William Burge. The Burge Lecture series provides students, faculty, alumni and community members the opportunity to connect with historians and scholars engaged in exciting research.
This year’s Burge Lecture is co-sponsored by the First Nations and Indigenous Studies Program, the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies at UBC.
Lecture description:
In what world do we imagine the past to be settled in light of its refusal to perish and allow things to start over anew? What are the conditions that make for this imagining, this fantasy or rather, demand of a new start point? In this presentation, Simpson will consider the world of settler colonialism, which demands this newness, and a world in which Native people and their claims to territory are whittled to the status of claimant or subject in time with the fantasy of their disappearance from a modern and critical present. This fantasy of a world without Indians or Indians whittled into claimants extends itself to a mode of governance that is beyond institutional and ideological but is in this study, deeply affective. In this talk, Simpson examines how the Canadian practice of settler governance has adjusted itself in line with global trends and rights paradigms away from overt violence to what are seen as softer and kinder, caring modes of governing but governing, violently still and yet, with a language of care, upon on still stolen land. This presentation asks not only in what world we imagine time to stop, but takes up the ways in which those that survived the time stoppage stand in critical relationship to dispossession and settler governance apprehend, analyze and act upon this project of affective governance. Here an oral and textual history of the notion of “reconciliation” is constructed and analyzed with recourse to Indigenous criticism of this affective project of repair.
