This roundtable responds to and anticipates the tactics of banning, censure, prohibition, and redaction deployed by conservative institutions of late. From the erasure of gender neutral pronouns by Argentine fascists to the elimination of "Latinx" by state officials in Arkansas, from the outlaw of DEI offices by the incoming Trump regime to Rodrigo Duterte’s genocidal “war on drugs” in the Philippines, it is clear that the right-wing believes deleting a signifier also deletes its referent.

Assembling scholars from comparative race and sexuality studies, this roundtable interrogates these directives to weigh their impacts both practical and theoretical. We ask: how do we teach, research, and organize in the university when the major subjects and objects of our work are banished from speech entirely? What methods of field formation and knowledge circulation remain as many of our key words are redacted and censured? 

In his early exploration of key words in cultural studies in the 1970s, Raymond Williams writes of a desire to construct a “record of an inquiry into a vocabulary: a shared body of words and meanings…of the practices which we group as culture and society.” Later, scholars in the 2010s heavily problematized terms like the human, Latinidad, diaspora, Blackness, trans, citizenship, human rights, nationalism, etc. that were coopted into American empire. Now that those keywords are being canceled and banned, what is salvageable of this academic conversation moving forward? In other words, in the cultural and political transition from the Obama years to two Trump presidencies, what remains of these earlier critiques of identity? What are the uncanny intersections between liberal manipulations of language and the fascist bans on free speech? How might we update our short-hand signifiers for race, gender, and community, or is it strategic to leave that framework behind?

In a time of widespread book bans, course censures, and fascist takeovers, how might art, literature, and culture provide us with a new language that counters or escapes state violence and erasure? Recognizing the spread of fascism as a global phenomenon, and recognizing that the politics of language have been vexed across time and space, how do scholars, writers, and thinkers in the Global South respond to redaction across different histories of liberalism, political transition, and fascist repression?

Please send brief abstract of anticipated talking points and brief bio to Tommy Conners thconn@sas.upenn.edu, Ava LJ Kim agbkim@ucdavis.edu, and Melanie Abeygunawardana abey@umn.edu by January 20, 2025.