SPEAKER: Daniel Martinez HoSang

Daniel HoSang is Associate Professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration and American Studies at Yale University. He holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Political Science.

HoSang is the co-author (with Joseph Lowndes) of Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) and the author of Racial Propositions: Ballot Initiatives and the Making of Postwar California (University of California Press, 2010) which was awarded the 2011 James A Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians.

He is the co-editor of three volumes: Seeing Race Again: Countering Colorblindness Across the Disciplines (with Kimberle Crenshaw,Luke Harris and George Lipsitz) UC Press, 2019; Relational Formations of Race: Theory, Method and Practice (co-edited withRamon Gutiérrez and Natalia Molina), UC Press, 2019; and Racial Formation in the 21st Century (with Oneka LaBennett and Laura Pulido) UC Press, 2012).

Dr. HoSang received his Ph.D. from USC’s Department of American Studies and Ethnicity.

This talk will draw from HoSang’s most recent book,  A Wider Type of Freedom: How Struggles for Racial Justice Liberate Everyone (UC Press 2021), a sweeping history oftransformative, radical, and abolitionist movements in the United States that places the struggle for racial justice at the center of universal liberation. Renewed attacks on anti-racist education and policies have centered on the contention that struggles for racial justice will inevitably disenfranchise and even humiliate those who have benefited from the dominant systems of racial inequality. Yet a long tradition of social movements, intellectuals, artists, and cultural formations have argued that the abolition of white supremacy can produce the foundations for a universal liberation. Rather than seeking "equal rights" within failed systems, these efforts generated new visions that embraced human difference, vulnerability, and interdependence as core productive facets of ourcollective experience.  A Wider Type of Freedom argues that from the nineteenth century's abolition democracy and efforts to end forced sterilizations, to the twentieth century's domestic worker organizing campaigns, to the twenty-first century's environmental justice movement, these transformative visions of racial justice have produced conceptions of freedom and interdependence never envisioned in the nation's dominant political framework.

Sponsored by the Department of American Studies & Ethnicity