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Abstract: I will address the ways in which Wynter’s unpublished work Black Metamorphosis reworks Critical Theory by positing a theory of black radical cultural politics.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.
New Book Presentation
Edgar Illas (Spanish & Portuguese), The Magma of War: An Ontology of the Global (Routledge, 2024), in conversation with Patrick Dove.
Friday, December 6, 2024, 4 - 6 pm, Maxwell Hall 222.
The Magma of War: An Ontology of the Global (Routledge, 2024) is a theoretical exploration of war as the ontological force that produces political and social orders. The task responds to a present urgency: the terrifying realization that war has become an uncontainable part of the logic of production of globalization, as we see in Israel/Palestine, Russia/Ukraine, Sudan, or the Mexican narco-wars. Divided into two parts, the book begins by surveying the most important thinkers of war, from Heraclitus to Deleuze and Guattari. The second part explores the geological figure of magma to theorize a possible nomos of global disorder. While in the 1990s Zygmunt Bauman defined globalization as a process of liquification of modern institutions, the changing mixture of air, solid and liquid of magma can help us represent the multidirectional shifts between violence and order as well as the internal contradictions of the immanent ontology of the global world.
Edgar Illas is Professor and director of the Catalan Program in the department of Spanish and Portuguese at IU. His research interests lie in political theory, Marxism, biopolitics, and war studies, and his field of specialization is contemporary Catalan culture. Before The Magma of War, he published The Survival Regime: Global War and the Political (Routledge, 2020) and Thinking Barcelona: Ideologies of a Global City (Liverpool UP, 2012), as well as various articles on theoretical Marxism, politics, and architecture.
Patrick Dove is Professor of Hispanic Studies and author of two monographs on literary reflections on Latin American modernity and its discontents (The Catastrophe of Modernity, 2004; Literature and “Interregnum,” 2016). He is currently completing a book that explores the uneasy relationship between literature and philosophy in the writings of Jorge Luis Borges.
Spring 2025
Symposium on "Heidegger and Nihilism"
Saturday, April 12, 2025
Speakers include:
Babette Babich (Fordham)
James Bahoh (Memphis)
Laurence Paul Hemming (Lancaster)
Andrew J. Mitchell (Emory)
Richard Polt (Xavier)
Details to follow.
For an archive of events, see here.
