The Mellon Initiative for Inclusive Faculty Excellence is hosting an event featuring Tulane University Professor of English Selamawit Terrefe, taking place on Wednesday, April 5th, from 4:30 - 6pm EST remotely via Zoom. Please see below for details.

How can we think of Black political violence, or Black revolutionary politics, given the assumption that one need to be free in order to engage in the political? Given the construction of Blackness as central to the discursive violence imposed by Western political theory and metaphysics, this talk examines what is at stake politically, poetically, and philosophically when modern antiblackness becomes critically foregrounded as a suppressed and hitherto mostly invisible parameter of modern thought. Reading Nikki Giovanni’s 1968 collection of poems, Black Judgment, as a confrontation with political philosopher Hannah Arendt, Blackness unveils itself as a principle that simultaneously animates and interrupts the logic of Western political and philosophical thought. Accordingly, Black judgement—as the indeterminate field for theorizing the violence constitutive of Black non-being— discloses the aporia of Black revolutionary poiesis as its politics. 

The Zoom link for the event can be found here.