Keynotes

Abstract: “Little Sovereigns” examines the rise in violent expressions of individual power in the US. Many Americans – from "forgotten men" to lawmakers to tech moguls – are seeking personal freedom by declaring supremacy over other Americans. Gun owners carry military-grade weapons in public, teens post rage-bait on social media claiming power to kill women, billionaire tech elites create new cities and space colonies where they escape democracy and reign as gods, and MMA fighters hyperbolically perform brutal supremacy over other bodies.  “Little Sovereigns” examines why personal assertions of violent control are gaining popularity, and suggests that many Americans, up against ruthless political and economic systems that offer no compelling path to a stable future, are taking matters into their own hands. They are holstering up to go it alone, but are doing so in increasingly brutal ways. They are rejecting the classical bonds of the social contract to instead reclaim the personal power to violently control other people. 

Elisabeth Anker is Professor of American Studies and Political Science at the George Washington University, and Director of the Film Studies Program. Her research and teaching interests are at the intersection of political theory and cultural criticism, with a focus on expressions of freedom, violence, and power in US politics and culture. She is the author of Ugly Freedoms (Duke, 2022), which won honorable mention for the John Hope Franklin Prize for the Best Book in American Studies, and Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom (Duke, 2014), a Choice Outstanding Academic Title, which won honorable mention for the Lora Romero Prize for the Best First Book in American Studies. Anker has written for The New York Times, Boston Review, and Los Angeles Review of Books, and she is also a media contributor on television. Her current book projects include "Little Sovereigns" and "We Go Low" a book about fighting for democracy.

Abstract: This talk examines genealogies of (un)freedom with regard to settler colonialism in early North American history. Revisiting late 16th and early 17th century settlements in (what today is) North Carolina and Virginia, the focus will be on foundational narratives of white supremacy and black enslavement. The stories of the first arrival of white people from England (settling what would later be called the “lost colony”) and the arrival of black people (on board of the White Lion) interconnect in terms of the kind of cultural and political work they have done, past and present. While the story of the “lost colony,” though an unsuccessful attempt at taking the land and displacing the indigenous population, has crystallized around the figure of Virginia Dare (recorded as the first white Anglo-Saxon Christian baby born in the British colonies in North America in 1586) who is seen as a national allegory of a future white America, the narrative of 1619 and of William Tucker (supposedly the first African-American baby born on the North American mainland in a British colony in 1624) has for a long time been untold, falsified when mentioned, and only recently been addressed more fully. Looking back from a time, in which racialization has recently re-emerged in political discourse with a vengeance, the lecture will reconstruct both histories in order to show how they intersect and perhaps even condition each other in a larger frame of what was to become the United States.

Heike Paul is professor and chair of American Studies at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. She is the author of five monographs, including The Myths That Made America (2014), a second edition of which is currently in the making. She is the editor and co-editor of several essay collections, most recently Sentimental State(s): Affective Politics of Order and Belonging (2025, with Sarah Pritz) and a 2026 volume on renunciation, published in German (Semantiken des Verzichts, with Astrid Séville). Heike Paul’s research fields include gender studies, African American studies, cultural mobility, sentimentality, tacit knowledge, and contemporary American literature and culture. In 2018, she was awarded the Gottfried-Wilhelm Leibniz Prize by the German Research Foundation; in 2019 she was inducted into the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Since 2018, she heads the “Global Sentimentality Project” and since 2022, she is the spokesperson of the Research Training Group “The Sentimental in Literature, Culture and Politics.” She has had fellowships and visiting professorships at Harvard University, Dartmouth College, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Thomas Mann House Los Angeles, Institute of Advanced Study in Berlin and in Delmenhorst, at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (ifk) and the University of Vienna.

Abstract: This paper takes as central to its claims that the idea of freedom is presently placed under significant duress and requires rethinking towards another future possibility. Therefore, this paper also takes seriously that that the idea of freedom is something worth holding onto. Taking up the idea that critical Black theoretical interventions and decolonial theory has put freedom in crisis, but also simultaneously avenged its meaning(s), I argue that conservative and right wing forces have offered an account of post-colonial and post-imperial life that is counter to radical logics of freedom, even as those forces claim freedom as the mantle of their own radical response. Building from global events, electoral politics and its outcomes, debates concerning epistemological meaning(s), and a wide variety of examples, I argue that freedom’s future, which is to say the future of the species rests on our collective coming into recognition about the foundations that underpinned an already always partially distributed freedom. I argue that freedom as both idea and practice can only be adequately accounted for from the position of the excluded. The future of the idea of freedom then is in the hands of those least likely to claim they have access to it.

Rinaldo Walcott is a writer and critic. He is the author of several books, the most recent being The Long Emancipation: Moving Toward Black Freedom (Duke, 2021) and On Property: Policing, Prisons, and the Call for Abolition (Biblioasis, 2021). Rinaldo’s work is concerned with life across the Black diaspora with a special interest in Black Canadian life. He has taught at York University, the University of Toronto and the University at Buffalo at SUNY. Currently, Rinaldo is working on two books: the first concerns itself with the possibilities of Black utopia and the second turns to concerns of Black contemporary art and the aesthetics of freedom.