Fall 2024: Sylvia Wynter, Black Metamorphosis
When in the 1970s Caribbean cultural theorist, playwright, and novelist Sylvia Wynter undertook the writing of her ambitious philosophical text Black Metamorphoses: New Natives in a New World, she was already known for her field-shaping postcolonial criticism. In this remarkable text we bear witness as she develops a profoundly influential shift: a counter-reading of the Marxist commodity within a process in which the Black experience in the Americas created the conditions for enslaved people to become native to the "new world." This unpublished text is ever-salient, both for its experimental cultural-political methodology that defies classification and its theorization of resistance traditions and of maroonage.
In Fall 2024, the Center’s reading group devotes itself to an intensive study of Black Metamorphoses. Guest scholars join us to deepen our understanding of her work.
All Center events are open to the public. Image courtesy of nalac.org.
Fall 2024 Graduate Courses
This term, Joan Hawkins (Media School) offers “Theory for Troubled Times,” an introduction to critical theory that revists poststructuralist and postmoden theory in a contemporary context. In “Power: The Ontological Modulation of Being,” Edgar Illas (Spanish & Portuguese) examines the metaphysical and political nature of power. Details -->
Spring 2025 Theme: “Being, History, and Nihilism: Heidegger, Nietzsche, and the Greeks”
We needn’t look far to find instances of a nihilistic mood in our life today. To understand our own situation better, the Center reading group, convened by Patrick Dove (Spanish & Portuguese), studies some of Martin Heidegger's writings from the 1940s and 50s. Details to follow.
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