Kadish Workshop in Law, Philosophy, and Political Theory: Ricarda Hammer, University of California, Berkeley

ATLANTIC RECONSTRUCTION:

EMPIRE, RACE, AND THE MAKING OF POLITICAL PERSONHOOD

Abstract 

This paper develops a Du Boisian theory of democratization, linking the formation of the rights-bearing person to the reimposition of the global colorline. Literatures on rights formation have traditionally focused on national polities, even if these cases were empires, and questions about the rights-bearing person had to be worked out in the imperial realm. Overcoming this myopia, this paper studies rights formation within the imperial cartography of the Atlantic world. Drawing on a content analysis of archival data from post-abolition British Jamaica, it demonstrates how the advent of liberal democratization is underpinned by a process that transformed the formerly enslaved from an improvable, to an incorrigible, Black subject. It finds that liberal frames, which designated metropolitan workingmen as capable of bearing rights, also created the colonial subject as incapable of holding these freedoms. Developing a Du Boisian political sociology, the paper shows how the formation of rights is inseparable from the historical construction and reconstruction of race and colonial difference.

About Ricarda Hammer, University of California, Berkeley:

Ricarda Hammer is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research and teaching engage questions of colonialism, postcolonialism, empire, race, and social theory. Ricarda is currently writing a book on abolition in the British and French Caribbean, exploring how dominant, liberal visions of abolition overshadowed radical alternatives imagined by revolutionaries from below. Her dissertation won the best dissertation award from the American Sociological Association and her research has been published in Sociological Theory, Du Bois Review, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, amongst other outlets.

At Berkeley, Ricarda co-leads the Anticolonial Lab, examining sites of anticolonial solidarity across the world, with a particular focus on movements in the Caribbean and the Bay Area. Before joining Berkeley, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She holds a PhD and MA in Sociology from Brown University and a BA in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge.

About the workshop:

A workshop for presenting and discussing work in progress in moral, political, and legal theory. The central aim is to provide an opportunity for students to engage with philosophers, political theorists, and legal scholars working on normative questions. Another aim is to bring together people from different disciplines who have strong normative interests or who speak to issues of potential interest to philosophers and political theorists.

The theme for Spring 2025 is “Critics of Liberalism,” and we will host scholars working in Philosophy, Law, History, and Political Science. Our underlying concern will be the normative critiques of substantive liberal ideas from both the left and right, as well as staunch defenders of liberalism.

This semester the workshop is co-taught by Joshua Cohen and Desmond Jagmohan.