On Monday 7 October 2024 Professor Jayita Sarkar (University of Glasgow) will be the second speaker for our 2024-2025 Seminar Series on Modern North American History, organized in cooperation with the Sciences Po Center for History (CHSP) in Paris.
Lecture title: Global Southwests: Capital and Uranium in the American Southwest and Southwest Africa
Lecturer: Jayita Sarkar
Date: Monday 7 October from 17:00 to 18:30 CEST
Location: Hybrid (in-person at Sciences Po Paris or online)
Please register here before Friday 4 October.
Jayita Sarkar is Professor of Global History of Inequalities at the University of Glasgow’s School of Social and Political Sciences in Scotland, UK. Her first book, Ploughshares and Swords. India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022), was awarded the 2024 Bernard S. Cohn Book Prize and 2023 Honorable Mention for Global Development Studies Book Award. She is currently completing, Atomic Capitalism. A Global History (under contract with Princeton University Press, America in the World series), a 100-year history of nuclear sites, from mining to energy to weapons-testing, retold through histories of capitalism, empire, and decolonization.
In her lecture, Professor Sarkar will trace the interconnected networks of transimperial capital and labor dispossession in Southwestern United States and Southwest Africa or Namibia through the materiality of uranium. Jesse C. Johnson served for decades as the head of the US Atomic Energy Commission’s raw materials division in Grand Junction, Colorado, developing global networks through the Combined Development Agency. Focusing on Johnson’s networks in Southern Africa, his consulting services for General Atomic, and the transnational capital that developed Rössing in South Africa-controlled Namibia, this article foregrounds the long reach of transimperial capitalist forces in spaces untouched by the promises of formal decolonization.
Click here for the official invitation.
