Keynote: Michelle M. Wright
Join us for a live, online talk by writer and scholar Michelle M. Wright intertwining the experiences of Black Lives Matter with cross-temporal struggles for racial justice across the globe.
The fact that most nations are unwilling to sacrifice, much less share, their political and economic privileges with their black denizens is indisputable. Yet, civil revolutions calling for greater racial equality, such as Black Lives Matter, expose the ways in which even minority collectives also value some lives over others.
In this talk, Michelle M. Wright shows how seemingly unconnected ways of thinking – physics and linear interpretations of time – have bolstered lopsided representations of blackness in our Western educational systems.
Drawing from her argument in Physics of Blackness, Wright will explore the meaning and ramifications of a revolution that values all black lives, not simply the ones we are taught to admire. In doing so, Wright empowers calls for transnational solidarity and the push for true racial equality.
This event is part of Sonic Continuum, our multi-platform research programme that investigates practices of world-making through sound, both as a force that constitutes the world and a medium for producing knowledge about it.
Online. Free. This event will be livestreamed on Youtube and include real-time transcription by Otter.ai.
Michelle M. Wright is the Augustus Baldwin Longstreet Professor of English and Emory University in Atlanta, USA, where she teaches courses on African American and Afropean literature and thought, with an emphasis on queerness, class, nation, gender, and sexuality. She is the author of Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora (2004) and Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (2015), as well as numerous articles and essays for academic journals and mainstream media.
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