The World and the Void: Anti-Blackness in Hegel’s Philosophy of History

press release: Please join UW Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies Program. The events are free and open to the public.

Presented by Nave Visiting Scholar Professor Rocio Zambrana, University of Puerto Rico.

About the presenter: Rocío Zambrana writes about the epistemic and historical-material bases of capitalist modernity and its racial/gender order, especially from decolonial thought and praxis, particularly in the context of financial capitalism in the Caribbean. She is currently writing a book entitled Metamorphosis of Value: Epistemic Protocols in the Long Durée, which traces the emergence of figures of speculation (economic/racial) endemic to capitalism through a consideration of the trade-plantation complex in early modern Caribbean. She is also working on a collection of essays on Hegel, race, and modernity.

Zambrana teaches philosophy at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, co-edits Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, co-edits the forthcoming Constelaciones de filosofía feminista (Herder), and has been a columnist for 80grados. She is the author of Hegel’s Theory of Intelligibility (University of Chicago Press, 2015), and Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico (Duke University Press, 2021). Deudas coloniales: el caso de Puerto Rico, Raquel Salas Rivera’s translation of Colonial Debts, was published by Editora Educación Emergente in 2022. Zambrana received her PhD in Philosophy from the New School for Social Research in 2010, and was faculty in Philosophy at the University of Oregon (2010-2019) and at Emory (2019-2023) before joining Philosophy at UPRRP in 2023.

These events are co-sponsored by the Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies Program, the Nave Visiting Scholar Fund, the Department of History, and the “Hegel, Social Theory, and the Problem of Recognition” Borghesi-Mellon Group.