Neda Atanasoski
Professor and Chair, The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
3121 Susquehanna Hall
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Education
Ph.D., Literature and Cultural Studies, University of California San Diego
Research Expertise
Critical Race Theory
Cultural Studies
Decolonial Feminisms
Feminist Science Studies
Media Studies
Postcolonial Feminisms
Transnational Feminisms
Visual Culture
Neda Atanasoski is Professor and Chair of the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. She is the author of Humanitarian Violence: The U.S. Deployment of Diversity (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures (co-authored with Kalindi Vora, Duke University Press, 2019). She is also the co-editor of a 2017 special issue of the journal Social Identities, titled “Postsocialist Politics and the Ends of Revolution.” Atanasoski has published articles on gender and religion, nationalism and war, human rights and humanitarianism, and race and technology, which have appeared in journals such as American Quarterly, Cinema Journal, Catalyst, and The European Journal of Cultural Studies. She is currently the co-editor of the journal Critical Ethnic Studies. Previously, Atanasoski was Professor of Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and the founding co-Director of the Center for Racial Justice at The University of California at Santa Cruz.
Publications
Reproducing Racial Capitalism: Sexual Slavery and Islam at the Edges of Queer of Color Critique
Dr. Atanasoski publishes new article with Dr Rana Jaleel in South Atlantic Quarterly
Author/Lead: Neda AtanasoskiNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Rana M. Jaleel, Cultural Studies Chair, Associate Professor, University of California Davis
This article tracks contemporary debates surrounding human trafficking, sex slavery, and the slave trade, in which the specter of the Ottoman empire and its system of slavery—as well as other “Oriental” slave systems—emerge as templates for imagining the place of sex in slavery. At the same time, the authors highlight how Ottoman and “Oriental” slavery is largely considered irrelevant to the genealogy of present‐day racial capitalism. By contrast, the authors argue that considering historically parallel and entangled slave systems is important not just to accounts of modern‐day slavery but also for how we conceptualize the “racial” in racial capitalism and the “queer” and “of color” in queer of color critique. Building on Black feminist historiography on the transatlantic slave trade, the commitments of queer of color critique, and contemporary research concerning sexual violation and racial capitalism, the authors explore how interconnected struggles across the globe are partitioned by imagined frameworks of racial and sexual difference that isolate entangled systems of gendered and sexual enslavement.
