Denise Ferreira da Silva is Associate Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego.
Professor da Silva writes in the areas of philosophy and ethnic studies. Her scholarship is uniquely positioned to examine both questions of ontology and racialization. In her book Toward a Global Idea of Race, she undertakes the difficult task of interrogating how knowledge of race and relations of power produce global space. Her lecture, titled “Rivers of Blood: Raciality, Violence, and the Possibility of Global Justice,” attempted “not to produce another account of the ways in which racial subaltern subjects are excluded.” Instead, she sought to “indicate how the privileging of raciality in critical works may help us to identify the necessary tools that will reconfigure the ethico-juridico terrain within which the “other of Europe” is always already positioned as an affectable “I,” that is, modern beings that are with/out law and morality.”