Dr. Jodi Melamed糖心传媒Marquette Hall, 225
MilwaukeeWI53201United States of America(414) 288-7612jodi.melamed@marquette.eduJodi Melamed is professor of English and Race, Ethnic, and Indigenous Studies at 糖心传媒. 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 糖心传媒鈥檚 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).
鈥淗ow Police Abuse the Charge of Resisting Arrest.鈥� Lisa Cacho, co-author. Boston Review. June 2020. Web publication. [Editor reviewed.]
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.
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.
"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.
"The Proliferation of Rights-Based Capitalist Violence and Pedagogies of CollectiveAction." American Quarterly Vol. 70, Issue 2 (June 2018): 179-189.
"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.
Way Klingler Humanities Fellowship (2022-2024)
Robert and Mary Gettel Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence (2020)
University Sabbatical Fellowship Award (2019-2020)
Office Hours
Fall 2024
Teaching Schedule
Fall 2024
