Fall 2024 Events

 

Reading Sylvia Wynter's Black Metamorphosis

 

Anthony Bogues, “Black Metamorphosis and the Revision of Critical Theory”
Friday, Nov. 8, 2024, 2 pm, Maxwell Hall 122 (virtual lecture)

Abstract:  I will address the ways in which Wynter’s unpublished work Black Metamorphosis reworks Critical Theory by positing a theory of black radical cultural politics. I will argue that Wynter’s posing of radical politics linked to issues of culture and the symbolic order broadens our conceptions of politics. In her conception radical politics becomes the overthrow of both a state and the epistemic grounds of state formation. In such a formulation within the Black radical tradition, revolution and revelation operate in tandem to make the new. 

Anthony Bogues is a writer, scholar, curator, and currently the Asa Messer Professor of Humanities and Africana Studies as well as the Director of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University. Professor Bogues’s major research and writing interests are intellectual, literary and cultural history, radical political thought, political theory, critical theory, Caribbean and African politics as well as Haitian, Caribbean, and African Art. He is the author of Caliban’s Freedom: The Early Political Thought of C.L.R. James (1997); Black Heretics and Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals (2003); and Empire of Liberty: Power, Freedom and Desire (2010). Besides his editorial work, he has curated and co-curated shows in the United States, South Africa, and the Caribbean and published numerous essays and articles on the history of criticism, critical theory, political thought, political philosophy, intellectual and cultural history as well as Haitian Art. 

Event CANCELED

Professor McKittrick needed to cancel her appearance for personal reasons

Katherine McKittrick, “Rebellion, Invention, Groove”
Friday, Nov. 15, 2024, 2 pm, Maxwell Hall 122 (virtual lecture)

Abstract: This talk examines Black musical aesthetics that not only emerge within and against long-standing antiblack practices, but which are heard and listened to across and in excess of the positivist working of antiblack logics. With a focus on “waveforms”—beats, rhythms, acoustics, and frequencies that intersect with racial economies and histories in lyric content—the lecture draws upon a wide range of passages from Sylvia Wynter’s manuscript “Black Metamorphosis,” with particular attention to Wynter’s section and consideration of “Jonkunnu as Cultural Ritual.” (Interested participants are encouraged to read the section of Black Metamorphosis under discussion (manuscript: 84-100) [PDF: 86-111].)

Katherine McKittrick is a leader in Black feminist thought and Black geographies, focusing on the creative, embodied, and intellectual spaces of the African diaspora. Across her work, she draws attention to how Black creative texts are expressive of anti-colonial politics. These themes are addressed in her books Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (2006) and Dear Science and Other Stories (2021), as well as in her edited collection and contributions to the book Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (2013). By conceptualizing Black diasporic practices as spatialized acts of survival, she introduces novel critical-creative methodological approaches to Atlantic history. Professor McKittrick is Canada Research Chair in Black Studies and Professor of Black Studies and Gender Studies at Queen’s University. 

 

These talks are made possible with the generous support of the Arts + Humanities Council and the departments of American Studies, Spanish and Portuguese, and Comparative Literature.

 

For an archive of events, see here.