Dear CICI community,
We are delighted to announce our annual symposium, Demos Anxiety: “Great Replacement” Theory and Democracy. The event will take place on October 20, 2023, in the Maude Fife Room at UC Berkeley.
Demos Anxiety: “Great Replacement” Theory and Democracy is a daylong symposium that gathers scholars from a range of disciplines (literature, sociology, law) to reflect on conspiracy theories about population replacement. Despite its extremism, “The Great Replacement” theory has worked its way into mainstream political discourses about race, immigration, and religious difference. A driving force behind attacks from Charlottesville, VA to Christchurch, New Zealand, replacement theory’s demographic anxieties are imperiling democracy. How do anti-Semitic, anti-Black, anti-immigrant, and Islamophobic conspiracy theories change according to their settings? What are commonalities and distinctions between their manifestations in the United States, France, Europe, India, or Tunisia? What are political and cultural engagements that challenge the phantasms and passions stoked by population replacement conspiracies? How can we cultivate and mobilize a powerful counter-imaginary to “demos anxiety”?
Programming Information
10:00 - 10:10 AM | Opening Remarks
Debarati Sanyal, symposium organizer and director of CICI
10:10 - 11:00 AM | Lecture
Eric Fassin (Université Paris 8), "The Word Turned Upside Down: Intellectual Anti-intellectualism, Orwellian Rhetorics & the Politics of Truth"
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM | Lecture
Dorian Bell (UC Santa Cruz), "'Jews Will Not Replace Us': Antisemitism and the Great Replacement Theory"
12:00 - 1:30 PM | Break
1:30 - 2:30 PM | Lecture
Christy Wampole (Princeton University), "Demografiction: On Population and Storytelling"
2:30 - 3:30 PM | Lecture
Sarah Bracke (University of Amsterdam), "Symptoms of Disavowal: Replacement Conspiracy Theories and White Supremacist Paranoia"
3:45 - 4:45 PM | Lecture
Patricia Williams (Northeastern University), "The Politics of Splintering Meaning: 'Anti-CRT' and the Rhetoric of Reversal?"
4:45 - 5:45 PM | Roundtable Discussion
Cécile Alduy (Stanford University), Donna Jones (UC Berkeley), Lawrence Rosenthal (UC Berkeley), and Aarti Sethi (UC Berkeley)
5:45 - 6:00 PM |Public Discussion
For more information about the content of this event, please contact info.cici@berkeley.edu.
Admission Information
No registration is necessary. Seating is on a first come, first served basis.
The Maude Fife Room, 315 Wheeler Hall is ADA-accessible. Please view this website for more details about accessing Wheeler Hall.
If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Victoria Jaschob at victoriajaschob@berkeley.edu or (510) 759-2232 with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.
Sponsors
Demos Anxiety: "Great Replacement" Theory and Democracy is presented by the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry. We are deeply grateful to our co-sponsors: the Center for Race and Gender, Center for Right-Wing Studies, Department of English, and Townsend Center for the Humanities.