When the frameworks built to translate lived injustice into legal and political power come under direct assault, the question of how — and whether — to speak becomes a matter of survival. In this episode, recorded live at Reid Hall, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia University joins Keithley Woolward, associate director of the Columbia M.A. in History and Literature to discuss her memoir Backtalker, written in part at Reid Hall during her 2022 Faculty Visitorship.
She traces the throughline from a churchgoing childhood in Canton, Ohio, through the sudden deaths of her father and brother, the segregationist instincts hiding inside her \"integrated\" schooling, and the article Mapping the Margins that coined intersectionality, to the political theater of the O.J. Simpson trial and the Anita Hill hearings she witnessed firsthand. Throughout, she returns to the book's title concept: backtalking as a refusal of imposed silence, and a deliberate act of historical and political reclamation.
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Host: Marie Doezema
Production: Marie Doezema, Tessa Overvoorde, and Anthony Valette
Editing: Theo Albaric
Music: Lili Boulanger’s Nocturne performed by Magdalena Baczewska and Sasha He
With thanks to the Nadia and Lili Boulanger International Centre in Paris
The Columbia Global Paris Center is part of a network of 11 global centers of Columbia University in the City of New York, one of the world's leading academic institutions. The centers serve as knowledge hubs that aim to educate and inspire through research, dialogue, and action. They advance understanding, facilitate partnerships, and build the bridges necessary to tackle our changing world.
Columbia Global brings together the Columbia Global Centers, Columbia World Projects, the Committee on Global Thought, and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination.
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