Black Matter(s): Opacity, Relation, Representation
Description
In recent decades, Black Studies has witnessed important work on the ways in which the overrepresentation of ‘man’ and the invisibilization of whiteness have functioned in service of a range of im/material violences. Our aesthetic and political investments, therefore, lie in arguments and examples that unsettle the imposed relationalities and the representational economy of what Saidiya Hartman calls the “racial calculus”, Katherine McKittrick considers as the “mathematics of unlivingness” and Christina Sharpe terms the “orthographies of the wake”. Struggling against this socio-symbolic order, this seminar is interested in investigating the perilous invitations to visibility/legibility extended to racialized minorities who attain representational status as exception or in abjection. In examining the intimate connections between racial formation, visuality, and knowability, Martinican writer Édouard Glissant proposes the right to opacity through which one can contest the imperialist forces that seek to capture, reduce, and flatten out one’s complex subjectivity and humanity. Extending his argument, Denise Ferreira da Silva cautions against the “transparent Subject” as the basis for emancipatory aesthetics or politics. If the desires for visibility, legibility and meaning categorize, instrumentalize, and contain racialized being(s), how can opacity refuse the representational demands for transparency and knowability embedded in both literary/critical practice and social life?
Drawing from the insurgent practices of black, feminist, queer scholarship of Daphne Brooks (“spectacular opacity”), Simone Browne (“dark sousveillance”), Saidiya Hartman (“black noise”), Tavia Nyong’o (“crushed black”), and Tina Post (“opacity gradient”) who reject desires for mastery of content and easy comprehension of subjects/objects, this seminar seeks presentations that engage with opacity: as creative strategy, as fugitive weapon, as methodological tool, as interpretive lens and/or as pedagogical resource. We might consider: how does opacity offer us ways to move against and beyond the binary of visibility and invisibility, without privileging either as liberatory? How do we, as readers, critics, and teachers engage with works beyond the analytic of (self-)possession and epistemic authority? How do works stage and refuse meaning-making, incorporation, coherence through their formal intentions and thematic content? How does opacity unmake dominant approaches to similarity, comparison, and difference? What are the aesthetic and political stakes of refusing transparency and focusing on mediation, formation, and entanglement? What alternate forms of being and belonging do modes of opacity allow us to gesture towards?
Taking seriously the tensions of appearance, interpretation, and contamination that opacity is enmeshed in, we invite papers from across disciplines, genres and objects of study.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Temple Marucci-Campbell is an emerging writer and scholar pursuing her PhD at Concordia University in the Art History department. Her research as a sensory art historian considers the significance of taste and smell in artworks by Black contemporary artists, and how these elements constitute and maintain histories immaterial to institutional archiving processes. Temple works for the Dark Opacities lab led by Dr. Balbir K. Singh, which is a hub for BIPOC political and aesthetic study and strategy
Speaker Bio
Darrell Moore is a visiting associate professor of Cultural Studies at Claremont Graduate University. He is completing a manuscript tentatively titled Passionate Subjectivity: Black Creative Intellectual Thought and the Poetics of Freedom.
Speaker Bio
Milka Njoroge is the Ruth Wynn Woodward Junior Chair and Assistant Professor in the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Department at Simon Fraser University. She completed her PhD in the Gender Studies Department at Queen's University. Her work focuses broadly on the visual economy of suffering in postcolonial contexts, examining how the global flow of images transforms habits of seeing and being seen, particularly in relation to migration, memory, and border regimes.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Jordan Ramnarine is a queer agender Indo-Caribbean medical student at Toronto Metropolitan University. He holds an MPH in Indigenous Health and Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. Jordan is interested in queer/trans of colour, anti-colonial, and abolitionist praxes for healing justice among racialized 2SLGBTQ+ communities.
Dr. Cornel Grey is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University.
Speaker Bio
Assistant Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Themba Mbatha is a literary and cultural critic working at the nexus of postcolonial criticism, Black studies, and memory studies. His book project, Illegible Subjects, interrogates black and postcolonial investments in visibility and legibility as idealized political positions, instead exhuming opacity for its politics of alterity and its unsettling relation to neoliberal articulations of the human.
Speaker Bio
Matthew Molinaro is a journalist, cultural worker, and first-year PhD student in English/Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. Grounded in the study of African diaspora literatures and Black feminisms, Matthew's work focuses on cultures of anti-imperialism and the aesthetic and political life of the Black radical imagination.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Camille Lopez is a PhD student in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of British Columbia. Her interests lie at the intersection of early modern literature and critical race studies, and her doctoral research investigates the early modern relationship between verbal and visual constructions of race. Camille completed her Master’s thesis with distinction at UBC. Her research has received support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Speaker Bio
Angel Ogoemesim is a PhD student in English at Brown University. Their scholarship considers the imbrication between disordered temporality and insanity in formally inventive black literature. They remain curious about how one might consider time, as suspended and recursive in its antiblack violence, and how its temporal vertiginous suspension, an interminable dehiscence or rupture, engenders madness.
Speaker Bio
Santiago Pierre-Neptune is a second year PhD student in the Department of Comparative Literature at Emory University. His research studies conceptions of blackness across early to mid-twentieth century Anglophone and Francophone literature and its antecedents in the Ancient Mediterranean world.
Speaker Bio
Pragati Sharma is a third year PhD candidate in English at the University of Toronto. Her SSHRC funded doctoral study engages with contemporary African-American and Black Canadian women poets. She particularly focuses on the ways in which their work represents, articulates and performs black feminist ethics and liberation through language, form and method.