Keynote: Alexander G. Weheliye

Image courtesy of Alexander G. Weheliye.
Image courtesy of Alexander G. Weheliye.

Apologies, due to unforeseen circumstances this event has been cancelled.

Join us for a live, online talk by writer and scholar Alexander G. Weheliye where he discusses the interplay between the conceptual and the material in black life.

Departing from the legacies of colonialism and in its representations of humanness, Weheliye explores Hortense Spillers’s notion of the flesh to discuss the figure of 'SchwarzSein’ [from the German ‘BlackBeing’], a phrase used by the author to denote Black Being as the constitutive limit for the workings of modern life. Weheliye shows how the flesh materialises movements in black that defy the purely biocentric, and how, at the same time, it provides openings for different formings and matterings beyond the human.

In this keynote talk, Weheliye invites us to amplify alternate modes of being that do not rest on renouncing black life but embracing its possibilities without erasing the traces of violence that give rise to them.

About the event

Online. Free. Live Stream.
You can access this event through this webpage and on the Nottingham Contemporary YouTube channel.
There will be automated live captioning for this event.
A transcription will be available for download on this webpage afterwards.
We are unable to provide British Sign Language interpretation for this event.
A recording of the event will be available afterwards.
The duration of the event is two hours. A rest break is not included.

Alexander Ghedi Weheliye is Professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University where he teaches black literature and culture, critical theory, social technologies, and popular culture. He is the author of Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (2005) and Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (2014). Currently, he is working on two projects. The first, Feenin: R&B’s Technologies of Humanity, offers a critical history of the intimate relationship between R&B music and technology since the late 1970s. The second, Black Life/SchwarzSein, situates Blackness as an ungendered ontology of unbelonging.

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