Fung Public Seminar Series: Where to Escape? Quilombo Fugitivity and World-Making in Times of Catastrophe

Name: Fung Public Seminar Series: Where to Escape? Quilombo Fugitivity and World-Making in Times of Catastrophe
Start: 2025-03-06T12:00:00-05:00
End: 2025-03-06T13:20:00-05:00
Location: Louis A. Simpson International Building, Room 144

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Seminar

Thu, Mar 6, 2025

12 PM – 1:20 PM EST (GMT-5)

Louis A. Simpson International Building, Room 144

Princeton, NJ 08544, United States

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Details

Abdias Nascimento, African Standard. Acrylic on canvas, 80 x 50 cm. Rio de Janeiro, 1993. IPEAFRO Museu de Arte Negra [ Black Art Museum ] Collection. Flyer for Fung Public Seminar Series: Where to Escape? Quilombo Fugitivity and World-Making in Times of Catastrophe

Colonialism and its enduring iterations continue to shape the contours of everyday life. From ongoing genocides and the rise of neoliberal authoritarianism entwined with White supremacist and misogynistic ideologies to the ceaseless devastation of ecosystems, we are confronted with an unsettling question: Where to escape? This lecture moves beyond conventional interpretations of fugitivity—often dismissed as avoidance or an inability to face a problem—to engage with the radical legacies and living knowledge of quilombo. Historically, quilombos emerged through acts of refusal and fugitivity by Afro-diasporic subjects who escaped plantations and forged new ways of living together in defiance of colonial slavery in the territory now known as Brazil. Reading colonial archives and legal reports against the grain, this lecture reframes quilombo tactics not merely as historical ruptures that sabotaged the colonial order but as enduring forces of generative redress and world-making otherwise in the afterlives of slavery. Challenging the boundaries of disciplinary scholarship, this work engages critical Black studies, Indigenous epistemologies, and legal studies to learn with quilombo’s vital technologies for imagining collective resistance in catastrophic times.

(Image credits: Abdias Nascimento, African Standard. Acrylic on canvas, 80 x 50 cm. Rio de Janeiro, 1993. IPEAFRO Museu de Arte Negra [Black Art Museum] Collection)

Where

Louis A. Simpson International Building, Room 144

Princeton, NJ 08544, United States

Speakers

Juliana Moreira Streva

2024-25 Fung Global Fellow

PIIRS

Juliana Moreira Streva’s work is primarily informed by anticolonial, critical race, feminist, and queer poetics and politics. She earned her Ph.D. in law from Freie Universität Berlin. She also holds a master’s degree in state theory and constitutional law from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. As a Fung Global Fellow, she will focus on completing her book project, while expanding her postdoctoral research on the activations of quilombo and their (im)possible abolitions and world-making.

Isadora Moura Mota

Assistant Professor

Department of History, Princeton University

Isadora Moura Mota is a historian of slavery in Brazil and the Atlantic world. She received her Bachelor’s degree from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, a Master’s degree from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp), and a PhD from Brown University in 2017. Before joining the Princeton faculty in 2019, she was an assistant professor of History at the University of Miami.

Hosted By

Fung Global Fellows Program, PIIRS | View More Events
Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies, Brazil Lab, Program in Latin American Studies