Thursday April 21, 2022
IRAAS CONVERSATIONS: BLACK ALIVENESS OR A POETICS OF BEING
with author, Kevin Quashie, Brown University
Discussants: Saidiya Hartman, Columbia University and Robert Gooding-Williams, Columbia University
Co-Sponsors: The Center for Ethnicity & Race at Columbia University
Institute for Comparative Literature & Society at Columbia University
-----------------------------------------------------------
KEVIN QUASHIE is a professor of Black Cultural and Literary Studies in the Department of English at Brown University. He is the author or editor of four books, most recently, The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture and Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being.
SAIDIYA HARTMAN has B. A., Wesleyan University (1984); Ph.D., Yale University (1992). Professor Hartman's major fields of interest are African American and American literature and cultural history, slavery, law and literature, and performance studies. She is on the editorial board of Callaloo. She has been a Fulbright, Rockefeller, Whitney Oates, and University of California President's Fellow. She is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford University Press,1997) and Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar,Straus and Giroux, 2007). She has published essays on photography, film and feminism. She is beginning a new project on photography and ethics.
ROBERT GOODING-WILLIAMS is the M. Moran Weston/Black Alumni Council Professor of African-American Studies and Professor of Philosophy and of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. His research and teaching interests include Social and Political Philosophy (especially the philosophy of race), the History of African-American Political Thought, 19th Century European Philosophy (especially Nietzsche), Existentialism, and Aesthetics. Gooding-Williams is the author of Zarathustra's Dionysian Modernism (Stanford, 2001), Look, A Negro!: Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture, and Politics (Routledge, 2005), and In The Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America (Harvard 2009). Gooding-Williams is also the editor of Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising (Routledge, 1993), co-editor of the Bedford Books edition of The Souls of Black Folk (1997), and author of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on W.E.B. Du Bois. Over the course of his career, Gooding-Williams has been awarded numerous fellowships, including a National Endowment for the Humanities Independent Scholars and College Teachers Fellowship, two Andrew Mellon Faculty Fellowships, a Laurance A. Rockefeller Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has also served on the Editorial Boards of several professional journals and was a founding co-editor of the on-line Symposia on Gender, Race and Philosophy. At Columbia, Gooding-Williams directs the Center for Race, Philosophy, and Social Justice. Gooding-Williams was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018.
