On Jan. 30, Yale professor Lisa Lowe held a lecture titled “Colonial Histories of the Present,” which navigated America’s history of colonialism, slavery and discrimination to study how each evolved over time and impacts the present.
Lowe is the Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies at Yale University and has authored multiple books and articles about colonialism and related issues. She spoke at the University of Connecticut’s Pharmacy Biology Building to an audience full of students, professors and experts.
After a warm introduction from Martha Cutter, a UConn professor and the interim director for the American Studies program, Lowe gave an overview of how to approach historical narratives with a modern lens. She discussed how oppressed groups often have hidden narratives overshadowed by dominant American voices and the ways modern scholars have revised history to include them. However, she warned that this practice does not always expose or transform the colonial framework as intended.
Lowe defined colonial histories of the present as the less recognized ongoing effects of colonialism and oppression on people in America. She argued that instead of rewriting history, we should reflect on its limitations and approach it in more nuanced ways that tell a more definitive story.
Lowe began her focus on America’s colonial past by looking at the treatment of Indigenous Americans, starting with the deprivation of their land and mass relocation. She emphasized the use of spatial enclosures for control and resource deprivation, consistent themes in these colonial conflicts. She also focused on how they were separated and indoctrinated at boarding schools, a colonial attack on their culture.
Lowe progressed to the enslavement of African Americans and their treatment after emancipation. She paid special attention to the role of African American women, who were subject to colonial domesticity. By this, Lowe refers to how African American women dealt with gendered enclosure, where they were pressured to reproduce while enslaved to provide slave children. After slavery, Lowe said many African American women worked as domestic servants, a legacy of plantation slavery that reinforced gendered and racial standards.
Lowe’s final historical point centered on internment camps used to confine Japanese Americans by the United States government during World War II. She tied this back to the idea of spatial enclosure and exploitative labor, as some camps forced Japanese Americans to cultivate stolen Indigenous American land for American gain.
Throughout the lecture, Lowe tied colonial practices from the past to their modern variants. While spatial enclosures are not as visible in the present, Lowe identified urban enclaves, factories and prisons as some examples of the legacy of colonial oppression. She also highlighted the persistence of racial capitalism in American society.
Lowe examined Fort Sill, an army base first established during the Indian Wars in 1869, as a physical location that carries the legacy and continued practice of colonial-based oppression. In 1894, it was used to imprison Geronimo, a military leader for the Chiricahua Apache tribe and his people. In 1942, it was used to confine Japanese Americans. The Obama administration used it to house migrant children and the Trump administration planned to do the same in 2019, but protests at the base prevented it from happening. Lowe drew comparisons to Trump’s recent announcement to house illegal immigrants at Guantanamo Bay.
Vangmayee Upadhyay, a fourth-semester allied health major, came to the event out of an interest in critically exploring American history and how it impacts the present. She enjoyed learning about how spatial enclosures were used to control populations throughout history.
“It was interesting to talk about the spatial enclosures aspect and how populations have throughout time and throughout history, not in the same exact ways but through the same methods, been subjugated,” Upadhyay said.
Eesham Bhattacharyya, an eighth-semester biomedical engineering major, attended the lecture to learn more about how minority groups are oppressed today. He was taken aback by how prevalent these issues are despite how long it has been since they started.
“All of these problems are connected to each other,” Bhattacharyya said. “Capitalism, colonialism, racism, all these came as a result of people wanting to cultivate cotton, essentially. They wanted the land, they wanted free labor, they want to make money, so they overlooked human rights.”
After the lecture, Lowe was approached with questions from the audience that went deeper into her points and the examples she drew from.
The event was sponsored by the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies, Social and Critical Inquiry, and American Studies.