Reparations Now

Event 1:

Workshop "Reparations...Now"

Speaker:  Frank B. Wilderson, III.
Location:  South Ross 674 (Verney Room)
Time: 10:30 am - 12:30 pm

Frank B. Wilderson will show the film "Reparations...Now" and work with students to engage the politics of life, slavery and notions of performance.   The film is a critical documentary (digital film) that captures the terror of unnamable loss shouldered by today’s descendents of slaves.

Specific themes to be addressed are as follows:1. Inside-Outside of Civil Society; 2. Feminism and Grammar of Suffering; 3. Captivity and Grammar of Suffering; 4. Afro-Pessimism and friendship in South Africa

For the workshop registration is required.  To register click here.

Event 2:

Plenary Talk by Frank B. Wilderson

Speaker:  Frank B. Wilderson, III.
Location:  S Ross 674 (Verney Room)
Time: 5:30-7:30 p.m

1. Afro-Pessimism and the Ruse of Analogy

The expanding field of Afro-Pessimism elaborates a paradigmatic critique of the Human that reckons civil society’s perverse and parasitic relation to the hydraulics of anti-Black violence. This talk will explain how this regime of anti-Black violence elaborates and positions Black people as internal enemies of civil's society; and why an anti-Black regime of violence cannot be analogized with the regimes of violence that elaborate and position the Gramscian subaltern, the postcolonial subaltern, the colored but non-Black Western immigrant, and even the non-Black woman. Until recently, most critical theorists have, for the most part, assumed the opposite—that though structural violence performs differently on different populations, an essential regime of violence undergirds the subjugation of all sentient beings; and, furthermore, it is claimed, all sentient beings are Human beings. Afro-Pessimism interrogates the explanatory power of these claims by demonstrating how the cultural production and ontological coherence of the Human is secured through the impossibility of analogizing the violence that subjugates the subaltern and the violence that subjugates the Black (or Slave). Afro-Pessimism argues that the ruse of analogy is, more often than not, the besetting hobble of critical labors on- and interventions through cultural objects; a blind spot that subtends one of critical theory’s first principles: that all sentient beings possess the capacity to transform limitless space into nameable place, and endless duration into recognized and incorporated events. In short, to wield cultural objects and, in so doing, change the fundamental nature of their lives. At every scale of abstraction, from psychoanalysis’s topography of the psyche or th

e Bakhtinian chronotope, ascending to Gramsci’s civil society or the dream of a new, postindustrial Commons calved from the glacier of globalization, cultural optimism, or optimism in culture production, prevails—as though the transformative powers of discursive capacity were hardwired into being itself. The presentation interrogates this logic and reflects on the stakes for critical theory and revolutionary politics.

2. The workshop is a screening of Reparations (a film made by Frank),...Now (22 minutes) and the activities of the workshop will be centered around the film.