Dear CLACS community,
Welcome back! For those of us beginning this new academic year, the summer break is over. But the longer sunny days are still here, and as we enter the busy temporality of school time, I hope we are able to hold on to a slower paced time, to gauge our energies in these times of multi-faceted crisis.
At CLACS, we have been busy supporting numerous initiatives which, in their own different ways, dwell on the ongoing legacies of settler colonial violence in our world, and in the imagining, design, and praxis of worlds that care, nourish, and sustain. I would like to highlight some of those initiatives, along with the programming I hope to see you at this coming year.
For the past year and a half, through a collaboration between CLACS, the Brazilian Ministry of Culture, and Revista Pihhy, a group of Berkeley Ph.D. students have been translating Indigenous research projects from Portuguese to English. Invited by the Inter-Cultural Program for Indigenous Students at the Federal University of Goias, members of this Coletivo travelled this summer to Brazil to participate in the winter gathering of Indigenous students. The Coletivo led a phenomenal day-long workshop on linguistic and epistemic translation, met Indigenous teachers, students and knowledge keepers, attended a Master’s thesis defense on the Xingu practice of huka-huka, and visited the Aldeia Buridina of the Iny/Karajá people on the banks of the Araguaia River. Greg Louden — CLACS’s technology and publishing mastermind — and I were lucky enough to join the Coletivo for what was one of the most profound and radical experiences of my academic career. In the midst of ongoing displacement, occupation, devastation, and genocide, I was immersed in and learnt from an ongoing anti-colonial praxis of knowledge and transmission for a common good. I wish I could share some of that experience with the CLACS community. For now, I encourage you all to read the translated texts, as they do offer a sense of that experience. Please read them, share them, teach them! And be on the lookout for an event with the Coletivo where they will teach us about their work as translators.
The conversations of this year’s New Vocabularies, New Grammars series, convened by Karol Alzate Londono, Nadia Ellis, Courtney Morris, and Tianna Paschel, are grounded in and imagined in the spirit of Leila Gonzalez’s amefricanidade. The scholars, curators, artists and activists who will visit us will help us begin to draw a cartography of the politics and aesthetics of Améfrica.
Our “Event Series” — year-long collaborations between students and faculty from across campus, organized around a common research problem — will organize events on Mesoamerican epistemologies and archives, on participatory methodologies of land relations and place-making, and on Caribbean anti-colonial forms of sovereignty
Read about the work being pursued by brilliant graduate students in the working groups we are supporting this year.
Looking forward to seeing you soon,
Natalia Brizuela
Chair, CLACS
September 1, 2025