2020 Meeting: Online
November 5-7, 2020
Image Credit: "Twillie" by Mwamba Chikwemba
Schedule of Events (all listed times are for the EST time zone)
Day One: Thursday, Nov. 5
Introductory Remarks: 9:00am-9:30am
K. Bailey Thomas
Session 1: 10:00am-12:00pm: Moderated by Corbin Covington
Ayanna De’Vante Spencer
"Knowing Survival: A Non-Accidental Epistemic Burden in the Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline"
According to a 2016 report, “The Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline: The Girls’ Story,” by Saar et. al, “sexual abuse is one of the primary predictors of girls’ entry into the [U.S.] juvenile justice system.” Unfortunately, Black girl survivors are disproportionately represented in the sexual abuse to prison pipeline, often criminalized for their direct and indirect responses to sexual violence. There is a problematic intersection between criminalization, how Black girls are expected to respond to violence, and how the state determines what survivors know about their own experience(s) of violence. Highlighting the case of Chrystul Kizer, I argue that survivors face a non-accidental epistemic burden to strengthen their epistemic position in relation to some proposition, ‘p,’ -- by acquiring more evidence, for example-- despite having an adequate (or better) epistemic position in relation to some ‘p.’ It is non-accidental because it is a burden that is built into the structure of knowledge attribution, rather than an accident of a fallible attributor or faulty epistemic resources for knowledge attribution. In this way, the paper illuminates a structural epistemological problem embedded in the sexual abuse to prison pipeline that cannot be solved by merely demanding state agents “believe survivors.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
K. Bailey Thomas
“Self- Recovery and Talking Back: Black Feminist Narrative Ethics through the Work of bell hooks”
This paper argues for the incorporation of narrative ethics into our intersectional ethical frameworks. Doing so allows for the fusion of resistant narratives to the commonplace dominant master narratives and permits those harmed to begin healing their wounds—physical and immaterial. Juxtaposing bell hooks’ notion of “self-recovery” with Hilde Lindemann Nelson’s writings on narrative ethics, I claim that self-recovery operates as a form of Black feminist narrative ethics. Utilizing hook’s groundbreaking text, Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery, I make the case for the utilization of marginalized voices in narrative ethics and caution against the creation of resistant narratives for the use of oppressed people instead of amplifying their marginalized perspectives. I conclude by discussing how this intersectional for of narrative ethics can be used to cultivate an ethics of care and healing for the social marginalized and oppressed.
Session 2: 1:00pm-2:00pm: Moderated by Nicole Yokum
Kristin Rowe
Amber Jamilla Musser Keynote: 2:00pm-3:30pm: Moderated by Janine Jones
"Brown Jouissance, Molecular Intimacies, and Kara Walker's A Subtlety"
The talk uses Kara Walker's 2014 installation "A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby" to delve into the different representational politics surrounding race and sexuality. In contrast to sexuality, race is often framed as visually knowable, but this means that we are left to grapple with distinct epistemological approaches toward violence, vulnerability, and pleasure. In order to make sense of the incommensurate, the talk offers brown jouissance and the process of molecularization as an analytic that centers oscillations between object/self/Thing and sensation as a mode of reading the aesthetic.
Day Two: Friday, Nov. 6
Session 3: 9:00-11:00am: Moderated by K. Bailey Thomas
Bernie Mendoza
"The Black Lilith as Third Figure in Octavia Butler's Seed and Brood"
Octavia Butler’s work focuses on overturning reifying notions of human purity at the level of both bios and mythos. In her first Patternist series and in her later Lilith’s Brood trilogy, Butler works to upend dominant European conceptions of the human which are grounded in dualistic thinking and revolve around a series of hierarchical binaries that include: black vs white, free vs unfree, civilized vs savage, Christian vs heathen, innocent vs guilty, purity vs corruption, miscegenation, and contamination, and chaste white women vs. always sexually available Black women or the Madonna/Whore duality. At the level of mythos, I argue that Butler disrupts dualistic ways of thinking via her revisionist, neogenesis myth that traverses both series. Through the impure figure of Lilith, the demonized first wife of Adam—and the other face of Eve—in the Hebraic tradition, Butler develops a third elemental and creolizing figure that she injects with essential concepts from African cosmologies in order to posit new life for all of humanity.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Caleb Ward
"Choosing Self-Preservation over Security: Audre Lorde and the Thick Necessity of Survival"
Audre Lorde’s creative work, from poetry to prose to teaching and organizing, pursues the project of survival and flourishing across the multiple aspects of her identity. Lorde uses the term self-preservation for developing and integrating the facets of her selfhood in resistance to the hostile society around her, which requires fostering integrity, learning to balance among the inner tensions of a multiplicitous identity, and resisting societal forces that threaten to impose a “narrow individuation of self.” This praxis supports the clarity of feeling deeply that Lorde identifies as the source of her knowledge about herself and the world, which, through poetry, becomes the foundation of her agency. Explicitly in Zami and obliquely across many of her essays and poems, Lorde describes how her survival requires choosing self-preservation instead of security; her vision is obscured when she orients her actions toward safety or secures herself against possibilities of upheaval and pain. This paper explores the tension between security and self-preservation that wends through Lorde’s work, drawing out how each relates to the task of “seeking a now that can breed futures.” I conclude by suggesting that the rich meaning of self-preservation in Lorde’s work points toward an oft-overlooked distinction between the thin necessity for subsistence, to remain alive, and the thick necessity for liberation, for survival, including the self-preservation of the dynamism of selfhood across its faces.
Session 4: 12:00pm-2:00pm: Moderated by K. Bailey Thomas
Andrea Warmack
"We Flesh: Musser, Spillers, and Beyond the Phenomenological Body"
Phenomenology provides rich resources to think about and describe the lived body. Black feminist thought provides rich descriptions of lived experience that do not so easily map onto a phenomenological account of the body. These descriptions of an other than or beyond the body, might be understood as descriptions of flesh. Through readings of three of these texts—Amber Musser’s Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance, Hortense Spillers’ “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar”, and Audre Lorde’s Zami—I explore fleshy rather than bodily accounts of lived experience. Drawing on an understanding of blackness as a paraontolgy (Black Study Group, 2018) this paper considers flesh as beyond the lived body via a para-phenomenology.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Zafirah Lawal
"Liberating Bodies?--Black Feminist Activism in the Absence of Knowledge"
The question of liberation—of how and of when, by who—is one of incredible weight in today’s society. It is also one that holds a plurality of forms. Particularly, in the wake of the MeToo movement, and now, the recent death of George Floyd, the question of female liberation and Black liberation seem more pressing than they have ever been. With many taking up social media activism to challenge the ways in which rape culture is perpetuated in our everyday lives, while others flock to the streets to protest police brutality against Black men, it often seems like a choice one has to make; which arena to exhaust one’s efforts. However, what the recent murders of Breonna Taylor (by white police officers), Oluwatoyin Salau (by a black man), Riah Milton and Dominique Fells (both transgender women) serve to highlight is that black womxn are being faced with a battle needing to be fought on multiple fronts. The question of our liberation seems ever complex: slippery to target, and difficult to realise.
On the question of liberation, it seems there have been several responses. Vanessa Wills, for example, has argued extensively for the upheaval of capitalism as the best chance for antiracist, antisexist work. However, what the field of social epistemology reveals—particularly, in the area of peer disagreement—is that we cannot rationally form political knowledge in the face of such disagreements. On the question of liberation then—of how and of when, by who—it would appear that we simply cannot know. My claim may seem overly-trivial, but it has important repercussions for the future landscape of political activism. For, if we cannot know, or cannot even be justified to think to know, there seemingly lies no basis on which we can formulate intelligible, concrete plans for action. There are two central questions I wish to explore in this paper in regard to the liberation of Black, non-cisgender-male bodies: (i) can we know? and (ii) in the absence of knowledge, should we act? My respective answers are “no,” and “yes”—I do not believe that there can be any claim to know how to liberate the Black wxman, though there is a moral responsibility to act regardless.
I will begin by outlining a central argument for the success of a theory of political scepticism, that is, an argument from the phenomenon of peer disagreement. I aim to show that as rationality requires one to modify one’s viewpoint in the face of disagreement with one’s epistemic peer, therein lies a strong basis that we cannot have political knowledge. Thus, we cannot form any rational judgements in the matter of how to liberate Black womxn. I follow this with an examination of one’s moral responsibility in regard to resisting oppression; I claim that such a responsibility does exists, but exists by virtue of the inherent social worth of all persons, not by virtue of a claim to knowledge about how such oppressions might be targeted. As such I conclude that though we cannot rationally make anything out of a claim towards Black womxn’s liberation, we are still required to act. I aim to end by reconciling my two claims by showing how we may act in the absence of knowledge.
Session 5: 2:00pm-4:00pm: Andrea Warmack
Prisca Gayles
"A Black Feminist Toolbox: Mobilization and Cohesion in Emergent Race-based Social Movements"
Social movement scholars have considered the role of individual and collective emotions in mobilization and cohesion but have not engaged with racialized emotions in this literature. In this article, I examine Black women’s increased participation in Argentina’s black and feminist social movements, as evidenced by their visibility at recent major protest events. I investigate why Black women’s membership is growing faster than in previous years, and, how movement participants utilize transnational black feminisms to empower new members. Drawing upon twenty-two months of ethnographic fieldwork, I examine how emotional bonds serve as political devices for mobilization in race-based social movements. I argue that Black women activists equip their constituency with a “black feminist toolbox,” giving them skills to process and confront the otherwise crippling forms of quotidian and institutional racism they suffer through. My findings show why and how affective processes of mobilization are critical to Black women’s activism in Argentina.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Morinade Jayla Stevenson
"The Anthropocene Human: Black Women’s Geographies and the Anthropocene"
In “When Did the Anthropocene Begin?” Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Eartho System by Ian Angus and John Bellamy Foster, both authors examine the arrival of the term Anthropocene in scientific conversations, but specifically its use in Geology. The authors notes the ways in which the Anthropocene was first described as a “new geological time” one defined by human interaction with the global environment; a new epoch. Soon thereafter, the debate became centered upon when the Anthropocene actually began. Should they refer back in history to man’s first interaction with the earth, or post-industrial revolution when fossil fuel usage’s effects became too hard to ignore? Scholars such as Claire Colebrook and Axelle Karera push against the ideal of a universal “we” as seemingly authors of nature arguing that such conversations fail to grapple with the violent making of “human” that is present in such discourse. Scholar Axelle Karera contends that the political Anthropocene, if it is to exist, must address the legacy black suffering.
In this paper, I will examine the “we” of the Anthropocene by turning to conversations of the human non-human distinction in scholars such as Sylvia Wynter and Hortense Spillers. In doing so, I will further the claims put forth by Axelle Karera specifically, the “we” of the Anthropocene is dependent upon the exclusion of those deemed “sub-human” in relation to the discussion of black women geographies in “Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle” by Katherine McKittrick. By placing these works in conversation with one another, I argue that we can gleam the possibilities to tell a different story and to think otherwise within black women geographies and the production of space.
Day Three: Saturday, Nov. 7
Session 6: 9:00am-11:00am: Taryn Jordan
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson
“Blackwomanhood en Abyme: The Ecstasy and Noise of Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground.”
This presentation thinks with Kathleen Collins’s groundbreaking 1982 film, Losing Ground, and well-known theses on aesthetics by Sylvia Wynter, Audre Lorde, Aime Césaire, and Jacques Derrida. If, as Sylvia Wynter suggests, the audio/visual artwork holds the potential to catalyze “a rupture with the cognitive closure and circular self-referentiality of our symbolically coded orders of consciousness,” it is only by means of such a rupture that we can govern the codes that govern us—in other words, actualize other modes of existence beyond our current, globally hegemonic vertical orders of being and existence. We might term this rupture “noise” or “the abyss.” This essay examines how Collins’s film, in particular its mise-en-scène and the apparatus’s grid of intelligibility, registers the paradoxical power of blackwomanhood en abyme as both the condition of possibility for the reigning order and the “silenced ground” of said order: one that produces foreclosed claims as out of order, and their irruptive potential a noisy excess.
Session 7: 12:00-2:00pm: Moderated by Zinhle kaNobuhlaluse
Joy James
To Afropessimism, with Love and Worry -- from a Captive Maternal
This paper reflects on the body of thought identified as Afropessimism and critiques levied by black feminists, social justice advocates and architects. This analysis, from the viewpoint of a nonbinary Captive Maternal, focuses on Frank Wilderson's 2020 "Afropessimism" (nominated for the National Book Award) and its depictions of black radical/revolutionary agency and gender/feminism.
Selamawit Terrefe Keynote: 2:00pm-3:30pm: Moderated by K. Bailey Thomas
Closing Remarks: 3:30-3:45pm
K. Bailey Thomas
Introductory Remarks: 9:00am-9:30am
K. Bailey Thomas
Session 1: 10:00am-12:00pm: Moderated by Corbin Covington
Ayanna De’Vante Spencer
"Knowing Survival: A Non-Accidental Epistemic Burden in the Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline"
According to a 2016 report, “The Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline: The Girls’ Story,” by Saar et. al, “sexual abuse is one of the primary predictors of girls’ entry into the [U.S.] juvenile justice system.” Unfortunately, Black girl survivors are disproportionately represented in the sexual abuse to prison pipeline, often criminalized for their direct and indirect responses to sexual violence. There is a problematic intersection between criminalization, how Black girls are expected to respond to violence, and how the state determines what survivors know about their own experience(s) of violence. Highlighting the case of Chrystul Kizer, I argue that survivors face a non-accidental epistemic burden to strengthen their epistemic position in relation to some proposition, ‘p,’ -- by acquiring more evidence, for example-- despite having an adequate (or better) epistemic position in relation to some ‘p.’ It is non-accidental because it is a burden that is built into the structure of knowledge attribution, rather than an accident of a fallible attributor or faulty epistemic resources for knowledge attribution. In this way, the paper illuminates a structural epistemological problem embedded in the sexual abuse to prison pipeline that cannot be solved by merely demanding state agents “believe survivors.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
K. Bailey Thomas
“Self- Recovery and Talking Back: Black Feminist Narrative Ethics through the Work of bell hooks”
This paper argues for the incorporation of narrative ethics into our intersectional ethical frameworks. Doing so allows for the fusion of resistant narratives to the commonplace dominant master narratives and permits those harmed to begin healing their wounds—physical and immaterial. Juxtaposing bell hooks’ notion of “self-recovery” with Hilde Lindemann Nelson’s writings on narrative ethics, I claim that self-recovery operates as a form of Black feminist narrative ethics. Utilizing hook’s groundbreaking text, Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery, I make the case for the utilization of marginalized voices in narrative ethics and caution against the creation of resistant narratives for the use of oppressed people instead of amplifying their marginalized perspectives. I conclude by discussing how this intersectional for of narrative ethics can be used to cultivate an ethics of care and healing for the social marginalized and oppressed.
Session 2: 1:00pm-2:00pm: Moderated by Nicole Yokum
Kristin Rowe
Amber Jamilla Musser Keynote: 2:00pm-3:30pm: Moderated by Janine Jones
"Brown Jouissance, Molecular Intimacies, and Kara Walker's A Subtlety"
The talk uses Kara Walker's 2014 installation "A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby" to delve into the different representational politics surrounding race and sexuality. In contrast to sexuality, race is often framed as visually knowable, but this means that we are left to grapple with distinct epistemological approaches toward violence, vulnerability, and pleasure. In order to make sense of the incommensurate, the talk offers brown jouissance and the process of molecularization as an analytic that centers oscillations between object/self/Thing and sensation as a mode of reading the aesthetic.
Day Two: Friday, Nov. 6
Session 3: 9:00-11:00am: Moderated by K. Bailey Thomas
Bernie Mendoza
"The Black Lilith as Third Figure in Octavia Butler's Seed and Brood"
Octavia Butler’s work focuses on overturning reifying notions of human purity at the level of both bios and mythos. In her first Patternist series and in her later Lilith’s Brood trilogy, Butler works to upend dominant European conceptions of the human which are grounded in dualistic thinking and revolve around a series of hierarchical binaries that include: black vs white, free vs unfree, civilized vs savage, Christian vs heathen, innocent vs guilty, purity vs corruption, miscegenation, and contamination, and chaste white women vs. always sexually available Black women or the Madonna/Whore duality. At the level of mythos, I argue that Butler disrupts dualistic ways of thinking via her revisionist, neogenesis myth that traverses both series. Through the impure figure of Lilith, the demonized first wife of Adam—and the other face of Eve—in the Hebraic tradition, Butler develops a third elemental and creolizing figure that she injects with essential concepts from African cosmologies in order to posit new life for all of humanity.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Caleb Ward
"Choosing Self-Preservation over Security: Audre Lorde and the Thick Necessity of Survival"
Audre Lorde’s creative work, from poetry to prose to teaching and organizing, pursues the project of survival and flourishing across the multiple aspects of her identity. Lorde uses the term self-preservation for developing and integrating the facets of her selfhood in resistance to the hostile society around her, which requires fostering integrity, learning to balance among the inner tensions of a multiplicitous identity, and resisting societal forces that threaten to impose a “narrow individuation of self.” This praxis supports the clarity of feeling deeply that Lorde identifies as the source of her knowledge about herself and the world, which, through poetry, becomes the foundation of her agency. Explicitly in Zami and obliquely across many of her essays and poems, Lorde describes how her survival requires choosing self-preservation instead of security; her vision is obscured when she orients her actions toward safety or secures herself against possibilities of upheaval and pain. This paper explores the tension between security and self-preservation that wends through Lorde’s work, drawing out how each relates to the task of “seeking a now that can breed futures.” I conclude by suggesting that the rich meaning of self-preservation in Lorde’s work points toward an oft-overlooked distinction between the thin necessity for subsistence, to remain alive, and the thick necessity for liberation, for survival, including the self-preservation of the dynamism of selfhood across its faces.
Session 4: 12:00pm-2:00pm: Moderated by K. Bailey Thomas
Andrea Warmack
"We Flesh: Musser, Spillers, and Beyond the Phenomenological Body"
Phenomenology provides rich resources to think about and describe the lived body. Black feminist thought provides rich descriptions of lived experience that do not so easily map onto a phenomenological account of the body. These descriptions of an other than or beyond the body, might be understood as descriptions of flesh. Through readings of three of these texts—Amber Musser’s Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance, Hortense Spillers’ “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar”, and Audre Lorde’s Zami—I explore fleshy rather than bodily accounts of lived experience. Drawing on an understanding of blackness as a paraontolgy (Black Study Group, 2018) this paper considers flesh as beyond the lived body via a para-phenomenology.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Zafirah Lawal
"Liberating Bodies?--Black Feminist Activism in the Absence of Knowledge"
The question of liberation—of how and of when, by who—is one of incredible weight in today’s society. It is also one that holds a plurality of forms. Particularly, in the wake of the MeToo movement, and now, the recent death of George Floyd, the question of female liberation and Black liberation seem more pressing than they have ever been. With many taking up social media activism to challenge the ways in which rape culture is perpetuated in our everyday lives, while others flock to the streets to protest police brutality against Black men, it often seems like a choice one has to make; which arena to exhaust one’s efforts. However, what the recent murders of Breonna Taylor (by white police officers), Oluwatoyin Salau (by a black man), Riah Milton and Dominique Fells (both transgender women) serve to highlight is that black womxn are being faced with a battle needing to be fought on multiple fronts. The question of our liberation seems ever complex: slippery to target, and difficult to realise.
On the question of liberation, it seems there have been several responses. Vanessa Wills, for example, has argued extensively for the upheaval of capitalism as the best chance for antiracist, antisexist work. However, what the field of social epistemology reveals—particularly, in the area of peer disagreement—is that we cannot rationally form political knowledge in the face of such disagreements. On the question of liberation then—of how and of when, by who—it would appear that we simply cannot know. My claim may seem overly-trivial, but it has important repercussions for the future landscape of political activism. For, if we cannot know, or cannot even be justified to think to know, there seemingly lies no basis on which we can formulate intelligible, concrete plans for action. There are two central questions I wish to explore in this paper in regard to the liberation of Black, non-cisgender-male bodies: (i) can we know? and (ii) in the absence of knowledge, should we act? My respective answers are “no,” and “yes”—I do not believe that there can be any claim to know how to liberate the Black wxman, though there is a moral responsibility to act regardless.
I will begin by outlining a central argument for the success of a theory of political scepticism, that is, an argument from the phenomenon of peer disagreement. I aim to show that as rationality requires one to modify one’s viewpoint in the face of disagreement with one’s epistemic peer, therein lies a strong basis that we cannot have political knowledge. Thus, we cannot form any rational judgements in the matter of how to liberate Black womxn. I follow this with an examination of one’s moral responsibility in regard to resisting oppression; I claim that such a responsibility does exists, but exists by virtue of the inherent social worth of all persons, not by virtue of a claim to knowledge about how such oppressions might be targeted. As such I conclude that though we cannot rationally make anything out of a claim towards Black womxn’s liberation, we are still required to act. I aim to end by reconciling my two claims by showing how we may act in the absence of knowledge.
Session 5: 2:00pm-4:00pm: Andrea Warmack
Prisca Gayles
"A Black Feminist Toolbox: Mobilization and Cohesion in Emergent Race-based Social Movements"
Social movement scholars have considered the role of individual and collective emotions in mobilization and cohesion but have not engaged with racialized emotions in this literature. In this article, I examine Black women’s increased participation in Argentina’s black and feminist social movements, as evidenced by their visibility at recent major protest events. I investigate why Black women’s membership is growing faster than in previous years, and, how movement participants utilize transnational black feminisms to empower new members. Drawing upon twenty-two months of ethnographic fieldwork, I examine how emotional bonds serve as political devices for mobilization in race-based social movements. I argue that Black women activists equip their constituency with a “black feminist toolbox,” giving them skills to process and confront the otherwise crippling forms of quotidian and institutional racism they suffer through. My findings show why and how affective processes of mobilization are critical to Black women’s activism in Argentina.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Morinade Jayla Stevenson
"The Anthropocene Human: Black Women’s Geographies and the Anthropocene"
In “When Did the Anthropocene Begin?” Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Eartho System by Ian Angus and John Bellamy Foster, both authors examine the arrival of the term Anthropocene in scientific conversations, but specifically its use in Geology. The authors notes the ways in which the Anthropocene was first described as a “new geological time” one defined by human interaction with the global environment; a new epoch. Soon thereafter, the debate became centered upon when the Anthropocene actually began. Should they refer back in history to man’s first interaction with the earth, or post-industrial revolution when fossil fuel usage’s effects became too hard to ignore? Scholars such as Claire Colebrook and Axelle Karera push against the ideal of a universal “we” as seemingly authors of nature arguing that such conversations fail to grapple with the violent making of “human” that is present in such discourse. Scholar Axelle Karera contends that the political Anthropocene, if it is to exist, must address the legacy black suffering.
In this paper, I will examine the “we” of the Anthropocene by turning to conversations of the human non-human distinction in scholars such as Sylvia Wynter and Hortense Spillers. In doing so, I will further the claims put forth by Axelle Karera specifically, the “we” of the Anthropocene is dependent upon the exclusion of those deemed “sub-human” in relation to the discussion of black women geographies in “Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle” by Katherine McKittrick. By placing these works in conversation with one another, I argue that we can gleam the possibilities to tell a different story and to think otherwise within black women geographies and the production of space.
Day Three: Saturday, Nov. 7
Session 6: 9:00am-11:00am: Taryn Jordan
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson
“Blackwomanhood en Abyme: The Ecstasy and Noise of Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground.”
This presentation thinks with Kathleen Collins’s groundbreaking 1982 film, Losing Ground, and well-known theses on aesthetics by Sylvia Wynter, Audre Lorde, Aime Césaire, and Jacques Derrida. If, as Sylvia Wynter suggests, the audio/visual artwork holds the potential to catalyze “a rupture with the cognitive closure and circular self-referentiality of our symbolically coded orders of consciousness,” it is only by means of such a rupture that we can govern the codes that govern us—in other words, actualize other modes of existence beyond our current, globally hegemonic vertical orders of being and existence. We might term this rupture “noise” or “the abyss.” This essay examines how Collins’s film, in particular its mise-en-scène and the apparatus’s grid of intelligibility, registers the paradoxical power of blackwomanhood en abyme as both the condition of possibility for the reigning order and the “silenced ground” of said order: one that produces foreclosed claims as out of order, and their irruptive potential a noisy excess.
Session 7: 12:00-2:00pm: Moderated by Zinhle kaNobuhlaluse
Joy James
To Afropessimism, with Love and Worry -- from a Captive Maternal
This paper reflects on the body of thought identified as Afropessimism and critiques levied by black feminists, social justice advocates and architects. This analysis, from the viewpoint of a nonbinary Captive Maternal, focuses on Frank Wilderson's 2020 "Afropessimism" (nominated for the National Book Award) and its depictions of black radical/revolutionary agency and gender/feminism.
Selamawit Terrefe Keynote: 2:00pm-3:30pm: Moderated by K. Bailey Thomas
Closing Remarks: 3:30-3:45pm
K. Bailey Thomas