The Global Silencing of Racism: A book discussion on Colorblind Tools: Global Technologies of Racial Power

A Conversation in the Humanities in Session Series at the Centre for Humanities Research, part of the Advanced Research Seminar.

Date:

Thursday February 26

Time:

2:00pm – 4:00pm

Venue:

Iyatsiba Lab,
66 Greatmore Street, Woodstock
(enter via Regent St)

Marzia Milazzo (UJ), author of Colorblind Tools: Global Technologies of Racial Power, will be in discussion with Christi van der Westhuizen (UWC) to delve deeply into the global silencing of racism and the permanence of white supremacy across national boundaries described in Milazzo’s newly released book.

Bios:

Marzia Milazzo is Associate Professor of English at the University of Johannesburg, and serves as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Her first book, Colorblind Tools: Global Technologies of Racial Power (Northwestern UP, 2022; UJ Press, 2025), shows how white people disavow racism across national boundaries to maintain power, and how anti-Black and colonial logics can be reproduced even in some decolonial literatures. The book won the 2023 Association for Ethnic Studies Outstanding Book Award. Currently, Milazzo is working on a book tentatively titled Darkening Rainbows: Post-Apartheid Writing and the Politics of Race. Her most recent publications include “Liberal Disavowals: How Social Scientists Mystify Racial Inequality in Post-Apartheid South Africa” (Politikon).

Her respondent, Christi van der Westhuizen, D.Phil., is Professor of Sociology at the University of the Western Cape, and a former Visiting Professor at Leipzig University, Germany. Her monographs are White Power & the Rise and Fall of the National Party (2007) and Sitting Pretty: White Afrikaans Women in Postapartheid South Africa (2017) and her books as editor include the Routledge Handbook of Critical Studies in Whiteness (2022). She has published articles in Critical Philosophy of Race and Gender Questions, among others. Recent book chapters include ‘Apology as a pathway out of white unknowing’ in Unsettling Apologies – Critical Writings on Apology from South Africa (2022, Bristol University Press).