A symposium on Black critical thought will be held on Friday, Oct. 2 at the A.D. White House from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., featuring presentations from faculty and students from multiple disciplines. Participants will consider how Black critical thought reconfigures central terms in the humanities and social sciences and will examine how we interpret the structures – psychic, social, political, historical, philosophical – that shape knowledge and experience. The Black Critical Thought Symposium will conclude with a keynote conversation featuring cultural theorist and poet Fred Moten. Admission is free; meals will be provided and a reception will follow.
“Faculty and students working on Black Studies across campus have been yearning for a greater sense of community, comradery, and legibility. The Black Critical Thought Symposium was organized around these desires,” said Parisa Vaziri, associate professor of comparative literature and Near Eastern studies in the College of Arts and Sciences. “It is a great honor to be hosting this event with Professor Fred Moten, whose work is deeply appreciated across many disciplines and who has been one of the most influential figures in making Black thought central to the contemporary Humanities.”
Moten is Professor in the Departments of Performance Studies and Comparative Literature at New York University, where he teaches courses in black study, poetics and critical theory. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2020 for creating “new conceptual spaces to accommodate emerging forms of Black aesthetics, cultural production, and social life.” His work with social and aesthetic study groups includethe Black Arts Movement School Modality, Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective, the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy, Moved by the Motion, the Institute of Physical Sociality and the Harris/Moten Quartet.
While the symposium will address racial slavery, colonialism, capitalism, gender and sexuality, it will not treat Black studies as a bounded field or discrete set of topics, the organizers said. Instead, the focus will be on examining how Black critical thought challenges or reshapes our theoretical vocabularies, how it reorients our relationship to thinking, to the human, to life and to death, they said.
The event is sponsored by the Departments of History of Art and Visual Studies and Comparative Literature. Co-sponsoring are the Departments of Performing and Media Arts, Africana, Government, and Literatures in English; the American Studies Program; the Institute for Comparative Modernities and the Society for the Humanities, all in A&S.
