Join the GW Department of American Studies for part one of our 2026 Mergen-Palmer Distinguished Lecture Series featuring Cristina Beltrán, associate professor at New York University.

Professor Beltrán's lecture, titled "Refusing the Politics of Elimination: A Rasquache Ethos of Abundance,” argues that countering the Right’s politics of violence, domination and scarcity requires cultivating democratic imaginaries that promise not only justice, but also pleasure, joy, beauty and delight.

Rather than mirroring conservative logics of dehumanization and removal that conflate freedom with the power to subjugate, this talk argues for a defiant, non-eliminationist ethos of what Beltrán refers to as affective abundance. Overflowing with feeling and embracing the excessive and contradictory feelings that subjects feel about one another and the world we share, affective abundance is a civic orientation that acknowledges both the violence of colonialism, conquest and slavery alongside our shared encounters with justice, solidarity and freedom dreams.