Events
Emma McNally. Image courtesy of the artist.
Upcoming Events
May 2
5:00 - 7:00 pm
Institute of Human Development and Social Change (IHDSC)
196 Mercer St, 8th floor
Tina Post Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression
Join NYU’s CRACS Co-Lab on May 2nd, for the seminar of Prof. Tina Post, the first Visiting Fellow of our Mellon's More-than-Perfect project. Arguing that inexpression is a gesture that acquires distinctive meanings in concert with blackness, Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression tracks instances and meanings of deadpan—a vaudeville term meaning “dead face”—across literature, theater, visual and performance art, and the performance of self in everyday life. Through this varied archive, Post reveals how deadpan aesthetics function in and between opacity and fugitivity, minimalism and saturation, excess and insensibility. Tina Post reveals that the performance of purposeful withholding is a critical tool in the work of black culture makers, intervening in the persistent framing of African American aesthetics as colorful, loud, humorous, and excessive. Please email us to register and receive the reading materials.
Tina Post is Associate Professor of English and Theater and Performance Studies, and an associate member of Art History and the Department of Visual Arts, at the University of Chicago. Her scholarly articles have appeared in ASAP/Journal, Modern Drama, TDR, International Review of African American Art (IRAAA), and the edited collection Race and Performance after Repetition. Her creative work can be found in Imagined Theaters, Stone Canoe, The Appendix, and Portable Gray.
May 8
5:00 - 7:00 pm
NYU
Now, what?! Confronting Authoritarianism: Respect for Reality
Visiting Scholar Henrike Kohpeiß will guide the next More-Than-Perfect study group Now, what?! Confronting Authoritarianism: Respect for Reality.
In his investigation of “Mourning and Melancholia“, Freud grapples with the meaning of loss for the individual psyche. Loss, he holds, is an experience that essentially disorients the subject in its relationship with the world and it poses a challenge to regain orientation in it. “Respect for Reality“, Freud says, is what the individual must find in order to continue its life without remaining stuck in a melancholic trap. Freuds proposal has been discussed in order to measure the impact of ecological losses on human communities by considering their relation to land and environment. Confronting Freuds essay with Axelle Kareras critical study on Blackness and the Anthropocene, the question shifts: How to make sense of losses when necropolitical regimes of coloniality have always already rendered entire areas as well as racialized lives as disposable, as lost by default? And how is it possible to respond to these realities of destruction when they are being obscured within infrastructures of unfeeling?
Please email us to register and receive the exact location and reading materials.
Henrike Kohpeiß is a philosopher and postdoctoral researcher at the research center “Affective Societies” at Free University of Berlin an the author of the book Bourgeois Coldness (divided publishing).
Past Events
November 1
5:00 - 7:00 pm @NYU
CRACS Co-Lab community kick-off event
Let's gather, touch base about some of our upcoming activities and plans for this academic year, and celebrate new work from three of our brilliant colleagues that speak to the central themes of our collective interest in critical racial anti colonial study.
We will pre-circulate a chapter/episode each from new books by Vasuki Nesiah (International Conflict Feminism: Theory, Practice, Challenges), and Chenjerai Kumanyika’s blockbuster podcast (Empire City). Our hope is that you will have read/listened to these in advance of our event, so that short informal presentations by Vasuki, Sonali and Chenjerai will be followed by lively discussion along the lines of our reading group from last academic year.
The event is open to NYU and CRACs affiliated members, please RSVP to attend.
November 7
Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry & the Center for the Critical Study of the Health
UC Berkeley (CA)
After It’s All Said: Reading Art as Confrontation
Denise Ferreira da Silva will launch the Project A Counter-Imaginary in Authoritarian Times, of which More-than-Perfect: Explorations of Black T/Senses of the Future is part.
Throwing blacklight onto works and practices of the contemporary art stage, Denise Ferreira da Silva comments on radical interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean that reflect on past and current political events through the lens of refusal.
November 15
7:00 pm
The Tramway
Glasgow (UK)
More-Than-Perfect @ Arika Episode 11
Conversation with Arissana Pataxó, Denise Ferrreira da Silva, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Geni Núñez
As part of Denise’s project More-Than-Perfect, this evolving conversation brings together influential figures thinking through Blackness and Indigeneity to ask:
What if we took seriously the possibility that this world, as we know it, may be coming to an end? We dread the loss of this world, but have we begun to imagine the one to come?
February 6
5:00 - 7:00 pm
CRACS Co-Lab Study Group: Now, what?! Confronting Authoritarianism
Join NYU’s CRACS Co-Lab on February 6th, for the first event under our Mellon's More-than-Perfect project, in which we will gather to think through the current authoritarian moment. The discussion will be guided by a set of recently published short texts, in which thinkers and activists reflect on the rising tide of new fascism in the global South and beyond. Please email us to register and receive the exact location and reading materials.
Judith Butler, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Marta Segarra: New political imaginaries
The philosophers Judith Butler, Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Marta Segarra explore the transformative potential of political imagination in times of crisis. How might we reimagine political horizons in a world marked by inequalities and global tensions? Political imagination, understood as the creative process of thinking about possible collective futures, is essential for expressing criticism, activating political desires, and bringing about joint actions that disrupt inherited frameworks of thought and open up more inclusive, transformative spaces.
February 10
6:30 - 8:00 pm CET
CCCB Barcelona (Spain)
January 30
5:00 - 7:00 pm
NYU King Juan Carlos Center
NYU
Film Screening: Prisoner No. 626710 is Present
On September 13, 2020, Umar Khalid, a charismatic student leader who recently completed his PhD at India’s prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University, was arrested under the draconian UAPA (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act)—a law that designates individuals as terrorists and allows the Indian state to imprison people without due process. His crime? As an Indian Muslim, he had dared to protest against the new citizenship law that the Indian state was trying to impose on its people.
Using found footage of his past speeches along with a forensic analysis of how he was framed by the right-wing, Hindu nationalist media, Umar Khalid’s close friends, Banojyotsna Lahiri and Shuddhabrata Sengupta, reconstruct the chronology of events that led to his tragic imprisonment. It has been over 1,400 days since Umar Khalid was arrested. He and his friends still await a fair hearing in court.
The film screening will be followed by a discussion with award-winning film-maker, Lalit Vachani and Middle East Eye journalist, Azad Essa.
CRACS Co-Lab community kick-off event
