Library After Hours: An Unflinching Look at Freedom

with Professor Elisabeth R. Anker

Join CCPL for a discussion with professor Elisabeth R. Anker on the complex legacy and untapped potential of the freedom offered by liberal American democracy.

Join us for a Library After Hours event with associate professor of American Studies and political science at George Washington University and author of Ugly Freedoms, Elisabeth R. Anker, as she presents: "An Unflinching Look at Freedom." 

Freedom is the highest ideal in American politics, but its legacy is complex. Throughout American history, freedom has supported emancipation and individual liberty while also supporting racism, injustice, and misogyny. Our political tradition embraces "ugly freedoms" that legitimate the right to harm and subjugate others but also offer a means to bring about the flourishing of all people, not just a privileged few.

Come get a much richer and more nuanced understanding of the freedoms that shape our lives with the help of Professor Anker, a scholar of freedom, violence, and power in U.S. politics and culture whose book Ugly Freedoms has been praised as "revelatory."

She'll begin with the American revolution. Former colonial subjects liberated themselves from unjust monarchy in a radical act of political freedom, but their liberation was only possible because of their widespread land theft from indigenous peoples, brought about through violent and world-destroying acts of dispossession.

Moving forward, she'll look at how our nation's emphasis of individual liberty has always been entangled with white supremacy, settler colonialism, climate destruction, economic exploitation, and patriarchy, and how it factors into our current debates over abortion, vaccination, and gun rights. Many participants in the Jan 6 insurrection, in stating that they had attacked the capitol for "freedom," were not lying so much as drawing from a rich American tradition of using freedom to justify violence.

On a more optimistic note, Professor Anker will discuss a second, inverse form of ugly freedom found in disparaged practices and discarded spaces of the freedoms reflexively deemed ideal. Defying familiar boundaries of free expression, she'll locate emergent freedoms in uninspiring, compromised, and disturbing acts otherwise dismissed as demeaning, gross, or ineffectual, such as looting, bureaucratic sloth, awkward sex, collective eyerolls, and radical sabotage.

Professor Elisabeth Anker is Associate Professor of American Studies and Political Science at the George Washington University, and Director of the Film Studies Program. Her research and teaching interests are at the intersection of political theory and cultural studies, with a focus on practices of freedom, violence, and power in US politics and culture. She is the author of Ugly Freedoms (Duke, 2022) and Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom (Duke 2014). Her articles have appeared in Political Theory, Social Research, Theory & Event, American Literary History, Politics and Gender, Contemporary Political Theory, Journal of Communication, and others. Anker currently serves as co-editor of the interdisciplinary journal Theory & Event. She is also a media contributor on television, and regularly discusses current events on Al Jazeera English, Al Jazeera Arabic, CNN, BBC and other networks.

This is a drop-in event, no registration required. 

Please note: this is a Library After Hours event: Doors will open for the public for the event at 6:45 PM. 

This program is recommended for adults (ages 16+). 

For questions, please reach out to programs@ccplonline.org.

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