Mary Pat Brady Hybrid Seminar

November 10th at 5 PM EST

In Person in Greenlaw 526B or over zoom. Register here

The culminating event of our 2022 Research Symposium is a seminar with Latinx Studies scholar Mary Pat Brady. In collaboration with UNC’s department of Women’s and Gender Studies, ECL’s Critical Speakers Series, and the Carolina Latinx Center, we are excited to host a hybrid session with Dr. Brady on November 10th, 2022 at 5:00 pm EST. While Dr. Brady will be joining us remotely, participants are welcome to assemble at the in-person session held in Greenlaw 526B or over zoom.   

Registrants will receive electronic selections from Dr. Brady’s recent monograph from Duke UP, Scales of Captivity: Racial Capitalism and the Latinx Child (2022), for discussion with the author. Please note: registration is required for in-person and zoom attendance. We look forward to seeing you there via whichever mode is accessible. 

Mary Pat Brady is the author of Scales of Captivity: Racial Capitalism and the Latinx Child (Duke UP 2022) and Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space (Duke UP 2002), which was awarded the Modern Language Association’s Prize for the Best Work of Latina/o and Chicana/o Literary and Cultural Criticism. She is also an associate editor of the sixth edition of the Heath Anthology of American Literature (Cengage 2008-2009). An earlier essay, “The Contrapuntal Geographies of Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories” (published in American Literature in 1999) won the Norman Foerster Prize for the best essay published in that journal for 1999. She has also taught at Indiana University, UC Santa Barbara, and UCLA; she has also served as the Director of Cornell’s Latina/o Studies Program.

Scales of Captivity has been celebrated by Latinx scholars for its incisive and historically cogent analysis. Brady traces the legacies of racialization and childhood, separately and together, to show how colonial power limits mobility. Drawing from works by Robin Bernstein and Sharon Stephens, Brady sees the conditions created by racial capitalism to withhold self-governance for people (especially children) of color. “People of color” she writes, “were figured as perpetual children who were nonetheless robbed of their childhood, denied the protection of innocence the label childhood offers as a privilege. In the great interstices between the child and childhood, one could be a child forever but never experience childhood” (8). Turning to Latinx cultural production, Brady shows how colonial power relies on various modes of capture and how we might resist those modes.