Attending To: Regard and Care

To regard means to look, view, sense, or pay attention to something in a specific way. Its emergence from the French “garder” (to keep) underlines its active quality, as well as the incorporative aspects of consideration and valuation that are at work when we regard something or someone. To “give someone your regards” also suggests an extension of the self (not unlike the roots of “attention” in “attendere,” meaning to stretch toward), such that “regard” spans greeting, looking, and evaluating. Indeed, while “looking” has been a foundational concept in studies of intersubjectivity from Merleau-Ponty to Fanon, the attitudinal valence of “regard” has been offered by Christina Sharpe in Ordinary Notes (2023) to mean “a habit of care. It is appreciation and esteem. It is the right of repair.” On The Maris Review podcast, she adds: “regard is not spectacle, it’s not a gaze. It is a kind of mutuality. I really wanted to think about that kind of mutuality as a kind of practice and ethic that we extend to each other, and that we might extend to each other, that says, I see you.” One might also recall Sharpe’s earlier formulation of “looking after” from In the Wake (2016), a practice of reading images as an act of care that refutes overdetermination and instrumentalization. How does looking become an act of care? How are the body, the attitude, the senses also engaged by regard as a mode of attention? Black feminist theorists (bell hooks, Nicole Fleetwood, Simone Browne) have long been attentive to the dynamics between aesthetic knowledge and racist epistemes of valuation, and their work instructs us in seeking alternative modes of visuality coordinated with “regard”. In Listening to Images (2017), Tina Campt attends to the unsanctioned, “counterintuitive” (and counter-institutional) resonances of Black subjects of visual culture, and in her recent book, A Black Gaze (2021) she surveys the work of visual artists whose work redefines how we look at (and look for) blackness. Likewise, in Anteaesthetics (2024), Rizvanna Bradley probes the modes of Black feminist inventiveness that pose “hermeneutic conundrums” about the appearance of Blackness more broadly. This panel seeks presentations that consider and attend to the practice of  “regard” —as an act of care, as a mode of sociality, and as an epistemological intervention. How does “regard” interact with other modes of perception? How might we consider the tension between care and judgment that “regard” raises? We are particularly interested in papers that engage Black feminist theory, or affiliated fields that share methods and commitments, such as performance studies, gender/trans/queer theory, or postcolonial studies. Papers may consider, following Jennifer C. Nash, the implications of such reparative labor in/on the field. Objects of study may include but are not limited to literature, film, art, performance, poetry, theory, or current and historical events.