Professor
English
Jodi Melamed is professor of English and Race, Ethnic, and Indigenous Studies at 向日葵视频. For spring semester 2024 she will serve as the Norman Freehling Professor at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan.
She is the author of Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minnesota UP, 2011), co-editor of Economies of Dispossession: Indigeneity, Race, Capitalism (with Jodi A. Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, and Chandan Reddy), a special issue of the journal Social Text. Her influential essay, 鈥淩acial Capitalism,鈥 is among the most cited articles in the journal Critical Ethnic Studies. She has published widely on relational approaches to critical race and ethnic studies and gendered racial capitalism in widely cited essays including 鈥淧redatory Value: Economies of Dispossession and Disturbed Relationalities鈥 (with Jodi A. Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, and Chandan Reddy), 鈥淭he Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial liberalism to neoliberal multiculturalism,鈥 鈥淯sing Liberal Rights to Enforce Racial Capitalism鈥 (with Chandan Reddy) and 鈥 Don鈥檛 Arrest Me, Arrest the Police: Policing as the Street Administration of Colonial Racial Capitalism鈥 (with Lisa Cacho)
Her current book project, Operationalizing Racial Capitalism: From its Command Powers to its Undoing (with Chandan Reddy) is under contract with Verso Books For today鈥檚 liberatory movements, it seeks to provide an understanding of how liberalism writ large functions as racial capitalist world-making praxis. Melamed and Reddy examine liberalism writ large not as a philosophy of freedom or just order, but as theory and practice of command. They examine liberalism鈥檚 key praxis-concepts 鈥 nation-state, (capitalist) law, property, security, citizenship and more 鈥 as nodal points for command apparatuses that are key to colonial racial capitalist operability. The intention of their operational account is not to make racial capitalism seem implacable, but to show that its doings are always threatened by protocols for making, continuing, and defending specific, grounded living (Black, Indigenous, migrant and more). By refusing killability and authorizing mutual survival, such 鈥渙ther doings鈥 evade and break state-capital violence circuits. Though pushed below or outside of 鈥榩olitics鈥 , as conventionally understood, such doings together are powerful, transformative forces.
Professor Melamed is humbled to have received 向日葵视频鈥檚 top honors in teaching and research, including the Robert Mary Gettel Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence (2020) and a Way Klingler Humanities Fellowship (2022-2024). She has been a Fulbright Scholar at the Humboldt University of Berlin (2012-13), a Fellow of the Portal Project Social Justice Think Tank, convened by Professor Barbara Ransby at the University of Illinois-Chicago (2020-2023),of the Race and Capitalism project, convened by Professor Michael Dawson at the University of Chicago (2017-2019).
Courses Taught
- Africana Studies/Race, Ethnic, and Indigenous Studies
- Film and Racial Capitalism
- 20th and 21st century U.S. Literatures and Cultures
- Cultural Studies/Gender and Sexuality Studies
Research Interests
- Critical Race, Ethnic, and Indigenous studies
- Gendered Colonial Racial Capitalisms in Global Perspective
- American Studies
- Intersectional and Abolitionist Feminisms
- Queer of Color Critique
- Social Movements
- Colonialism, the Nation-State; Decolonization
Publications
- 鈥淲.E.B. Du Bois鈥檚 UnAmerican End, Reconsidered鈥 Tyler Monson, co-author. No Deed But Memory. Phillip Luke Sinitiere, editor (University of Mississippi Press, 2023)
- " 鈥楧on鈥檛 Arrest Me, Arrest the Police鈥: Uprisings against Policing as the Street Administration of Colonial Racial Capitalist Orders.鈥 Lisa Cacho, co-author. Colonial Racial Capitalisms. Jodi Byrd, Lisa Cacho, Bryan Jordan Jefferson, and Susan Koshy, editors. September 2022
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鈥淗ow Police Abuse the Charge of Resisting Arrest.鈥 Lisa Cacho, co-author. Boston Review. June 2020. Web publication. [Editor reviewed.]
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鈥淯sing Liberal Rights to Enforce Racial Capitalism.鈥 Chandan Reddy, co-author. Items: Journal of the Social Science Research Council. (Race and Capitalism Forum, Michael Dawson and Megan Ming Francis, Editors). Web publication. July 30, 2019.
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Economies of Disposession: Indigeneity, Race, and Capitalism. Jodi Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, and Chandan Reddy, co-editors. A special issue of Social Text, no. 135 (June 2018). 168 pages.
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"Predatory Value: Economies of Dispossession and Disturbed Relationalities." Co-authored with Jodi Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, and Chandan Reddy. Social Text No. 135 (May 2018): 1-18.
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"The Proliferation of Rights-Based Capitalist Violence and Pedagogies of CollectiveAction." American Quarterly Vol. 70, Issue 2 (June 2018): 179-189.
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"Being Together Subversively, Outside in the University of Hegemonic Affirmation and Repressive Violence, As Things Heat Up (Again).鈥 American Quarterly. 68.4 (Spring 2016). 980-991.
- "Proceduralism, Predisposing, Poesis: Institutionality, In the Making.鈥 Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association. Issue 5.1 (Spring 2016): Web. 7000 words. http://csalateral.org/wp/issue/5-1/forum-alt-humanities-institutionality-making-melamed/
- "Post-marxism, American studies, and post-capitalist futures.鈥 Approaches to American Cultural Studies. Eds. Antje Dallmann, Eva Boesenberg. New York: Routledge, 2016. 133-145.
- 鈥淩acial Capitalism.鈥 Journal of Critical Ethnic Studies 1.1. Spring 2015: 76-86.
- "Diversity." Keywords for American Cultural Studies, Second Edition. Eds. Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler, New York, NY: New York University Press, 2014.
- "Dangerous Associations." American Quarterly 66.2 (Summer 2014).
- "Academic Freedom with Violence," co-authored with Roderick A. Ferguson, AAUG Journal of Academic Freedom, volume 4 (2013).
- Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
- "Reading Tehran in Lolita: Seizing Literary Value for Neoliberal Multiculturalism." Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization. Eds. Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick Ferguson. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011
- "The Killing Joke of Sympathy: Chester Himes's End of a Primitive Sounds the Limits of Mid-Century Racial Liberalism." American Literature 81 (Dec. 2008).
- 鈥淭he Ruptures of American Capital,鈥 American Literature 79,4 (Winter 2007): 843-845.
- 鈥淭he Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism,鈥 Social Text 89 (Winter 2006): 1-25.
- 鈥淲.E.B. Du Bois鈥檚 UnAmerican End,鈥 African American Review 40 (Fall 2006): 533-550.
Honors and Awards
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Way Klingler Humanities Fellowship (2022-2024)
- Portal Project Fellow, University of Illinois Chicago, Social Justice Initiative (2021-2023)
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Robert and Mary Gettel Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence (2020)
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University Sabbatical Fellowship Award (2019-2020)
- Fulbright Award (2012-2013)
- Wisconsin Humanities Council Grants (2012. 2010, 2006)
- James R. Grahl Research Fellow, University of Nebraska, Kearney and the Crane Trust (2012)
- American Studies Association, Community Partnership Grant (2007)
- Mellon Research Grant (2007)
- Faculty Development Award, 向日葵视频(2005)
- Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities (2002-2004)
- Social Science Research Council Fellowship (2000-2003)
- Columbia University Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy Fellowship (2001-2003)
Additional Information
Office Hours
Fall 2024
- Mon 12:30-1:45 and 5:00-6:00
- Wed 5:00-6:00
- By appointment
Teaching Schedule
Fall 2024
- 4810/101 MW 2:00-3:15 Lalumiere Hall 216
- Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies
- 4810/102 MW 3:30-4:45 Lalumiere Hall 216
- Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies