Conference Program
Embodiment and Race Conference
Clemson University, April 11-13, 2019
THURSDAY April 11th
All Thursday sessions, apart from the keynote address at 5:30pm, will all be Bowfin (Outdoor lab). The keynote address is going to take place at McKissick Theatre, 720 McMillan Rd, Clemson, SC 29631
8:30-9:30 Yoga and Meditation, Shaila Amin (ranjana@clemson.edu)
8:00-9:30 Breakfast
9:30-11:00 Registration: Outdoor Lab
11:00-11:10 Opening Remarks: Edyta Kuzian, Conference Director
11:10-11:20 Orientation
Session 1: Concepts of Race and Racism Moderator: Brookes Brown
11:20-12:00 Franco Manni, King’s College London (endorester@gmail.com):
“Cultural Traumas, Intellectual Fallacies and Moral Mistakes’” (Skype presentation)
12:00-12:45 Joshua Sturman, Duquesne University (JoshSturman@gmail.com):
“Obscuring Humanity: A Theory of Structural Racism”
12:45-2:15 Lunch Break. Also, available during your lunch break: pontoon boat ride from 1:15-2:00 pm (30 min)
Session 2: Race and Embodiment Moderator: David Antonini
2:15-3:00 Miranda Young, The New School for Social Research (younm207@newschool.edu)
“Frantz Fanon’s Poetic Rupture”
3:00-3:45 Mallessa James, Goddard College (les.james@goddard.edu)
“Embodiment and Race”
3:45-4:30 Lisa M. Madura, Vanderbilt University (Lisa.m.madura@vanderbilt.edu)
“Anti-Social Habit and Critical Disruption”
4:30-5:00 Transportation from the Outdoor Lab to McKissick Theatre @ Clemson University
5:00-5:30 Reception at McKissick Theatre at Clemson University
Session 3: KEYNOTE: Alia Al-Saji, McGill University (alia.al-saji@mcgill.ca)
5:30-7:00 “Glued to the Image: Fanon and a critical phenomenology of racialization through works of art” at McKissick Theatre
Introduction: Edyta Kuzian, Clemson University
7:10-7:50 Transportation from McKissick Theatre to the Outdoor Lab
8:00-10:00 Dinner Reception by The Village Bakery & Café and Campfire Area at the Outdoor Lab
Music Performance by Six Chickens and a Beer
FRIDAY, April 12th
All Friday sessions, apart from the keynote address at 6pm, will all be Bowfin (Outdoor lab). The keynote address is going to take place at McKissick Theatre, 720 McMillan Rd, Clemson, SC 29631
7:30-8:30 Yoga and Meditation, Renee Gahan (rengahan@gmail.com)
7:30-9:00 Breakfast
Session 4: Embodied Experience and the Political Moderator: Adam Gies
9:00-9:45 William Maker, Clemson University (makerw@clemson.edu)
“Black Bodies, Black Souls: An American Narrative.”
9:45-10:30 Jyothis James, Texas A&M University (jyothis@tamu.edu)
“Dialectical Stagnation and the Permanence of Racism”
10:30-10:45 Coffee Break
Session 5: Race, Place, and Embodiment Moderator: Charles Starkey
10:45-11:30 Nathifa Greene, Gettysburg College (ngreene@gettysburg.edu)
“Race Talk and Land Distribution in Trinidad After Caroni (1975) Ltd.”
11:30-12:15 Shaeeda Mensah, Temple University (shaeeda.mensah@gmail.com)
“Fear and Black Feminine Embodiment: Black Women as Threats to the American
Populace”
12:15-1:00 Rónké A. Òké, West Chester University (roke@wcupa.edu)
“Race Doesn’t Really Work Here”: Thinking Nigeria Within the Logic of
“Racelessness” in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah”
1:00-3:00 Lunch Break Also, available during your lunch break: pontoon boat ride from
1:45- 2:45 pm (1h)
Session 6: Identity and Race Moderator: David Antonini
3:00-3:45 Roxanne Burton, The University of the West Indies
“Why Race is a Crucial Dimension of Personal Identity “
3:45-4:30 Maia Wellborn, Fordham University (mwellborn@fordham.edu)
“Affective Exploitation and Black Structural Oppression”
5:30-6:00 Transportation from the Outdoor Lab to McKissick Theatre @ Clemson University
6:00-6:30 Reception at McKissick Theatre
Session 7: KEYNOTE: George Yancy, Emory University (george.d.yancy@emory.edu )
6:30- 8:00 “Whiteness, Racism, and Bodily ‘Edges’” at McKissick Theatre Introduction: Edyta Kuzian
8:00-8:30 Transportation from McKissick Theatre to the Outdoor Lab
8:30-10:00 Dinner Reception by The Village Bakery & Café and Campfire Area at the Outdoor Lab
Music Performance by The Stove Bolts
SATURDAY April 13th
All Saturday sessions will all be at Bowfin (Outdoor lab)
7:30-8-30 Yoga and Meditation Renee Gahan (rengahan@gmail.com)
8:00-9:00 Breakfast Room
Session 8: Racialized Bodies Moderator: Riley Roche
9:00-9:30 Chiodera “Chi-Chi” Drayton-Smith, Armoni Dunwoody, Robert Magwood
9:30-10:30 Malik Curry, Keshauna Goines, Dajonia Jackson
10:30-10:45 Coffee Break
10:45-11:45 Barbara Hamberg, Racquel “Rocky” Collier, Sylvia Wu, True Liles
Session 9: Generation Z: Food for Thought
11:45-12:30 “Food for Thought”, Short film and discussion by Geveryl Robinson (geveryr@clemson.edu) and Santora Byrd, Shiloh Eyabi, Julia Haskins,
Amaya Hill-Montgomery, Kalvyn McDaniel, Wyatt Naylor, Karen Smith,
John "Jack" Stamm, Yuankai "Tony" Wang
12:30-3:00 Lunch Break. Also available during high ropes from 1 pm – 2:45 pm
Session 10: Closing Session
3:30-4:30 Concluding remarks and open discussion
4:30-6:00 Tour of Clemson University, Clemson Area African American Museum
6:00-7:30 Dinner
8:00-10:00 Music Performance by The Stove Bolts
Funding for the Embodiment and Race Conference, Clemson University, April 11-13, 2019 has been graciously provided by the
1) Department of Philosophy & Religion (Richard Amesbury, Ph.D.)
2) Provost Office (Carla Bennett, College Financial Officer)
3) Clemson University, College of Architecture, Arts, and Humanities (Dean Richard E. Goodstein, Ph.D.)
4) Women's Leadership (Diane Perpich, Ph.D.)
5) Pan-African Studies (Abel Bartley, Ph.D.)
6) Chief Diversity Officer (Lee Gill, J.D.)
7) Humanities Hub (Lee Morrissey, Ph.D.)
8) Department of English (Susanna Ashton, Ph.D.)
9) Creative Inquiry
10) The City of Clemson
11) Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminal Justice (Katherine Weisensee, Ph.D.)
12) GANTT Center (Kendra Stewart-Tillman, Ph.D.)
Keynote Speakers:
Glued to the Image:
Fanon and a critical phenomenology of racialization through works of art
Alia Al-Saji
Department of Philosophy
McGill University
Abstract
I develop a phenomenology of racialized encounters with works of art and film, wherein the racialized viewer feels cast as perpetually past, coming “too late” to intervene in the meaning of her own representation. This points to the distinctive role that the colonial past plays in mediating and constructing our self-images. I draw on my experience of two exhibitions that take Muslims and/or Arabs as their subject matter and that ostensibly try to interrupt or subvert racialization, while reproducing some of its tropes. My examples are, first, the 2015 Orientalism exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts that focused on the 19th century painter Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant and included works by Arab women artists, staged as a response. And, second, a sculptural installation by Bob and Roberta Smith at the Leeds City Art Gallery, created in response to the imperial power painting, General Gordon's Last Stand, that is housed there. My interest is in how artworks contribute to the embodied experience of being racialized, in ways that not only amplify the circulation of images, but also constitute difficult temporal relations to images. Drawing on Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, I argue that such racialized temporality is sticky, or stuck, so that we are weighted and bogged down by a colonial duration.
BIO:
Alia Al-Saji is Associate Professor of Philosophy at McGill University (Montreal, Canada). Her research brings together critical phenomenology, French philosophy, feminist philosophy, and critical philosophy of race. Running through her work is an abiding interest in themes of time, racialization, and embodiment, the intersection of which she seeks to elaborate.
Her publications include: “The Racialization of Muslim Veils: A philosophical analysis” (Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2010); and “Material Life: Bergsonian tendencies in Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy” in Differences: Rereading Beauvoir and Irigaray (Oxford University Press, 2018). Al-Saji's recent work argues for the philosophical, political, and lived importance of hesitation, notably in her essay: “A Phenomenology of Hesitation: Interrupting racializing habits of seeing” (in Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race, SUNY, 2014).
She is currently completing a monograph on Hesitation: Critical Phenomenology, Colonial Duration, and the Affective Weight of the Past. In this book, she elaborates a philosophy of time as embodied, intercorporeal, and racialized in light of the work of Bergson, Fanon, and Merleau-Ponty and in dialogue with critical race, decolonial, and feminist philosophies. Al-Saji is editor of the Feminist Philosophy section of the journal Philosophy Compass and co-editor of the Symposia on Gender, Race, and Philosophy.
https://www.mcgill.ca/philosophy/alia-al-saji
"Whiteness, Racism, and Bodily 'Edges'"
George Yancy
Professor of Philosophy at Emory University
Abstract
In this talk, I will describe some of the spectacular expressions of whiteness within the context of my letter of love to white people, "Dear White America," that appeared in The Stone, The New York Times, in December 2015. The objective here is to make explicit just how white racism continues to exist within its unabashed and virulent forms vis-a-vis the Black body in the 21st century. I will do this by sharing some of the very raw responses that I received for writing "Dear White America" as a way of setting the stage for contesting a false dichotomy between embodied "bad whites" and embodied "good whites." My objective is to show just how pervasively problematic whiteness is within its embodied-being-in-the-world and the ways in which whiteness should be rethought through a conceptual frame of what I call an ontology of no edges. I will explore this conception of an ontology of no edges through everyday and mundane activities such as when I pass by white people in their cars or find myself within an elevator with a white woman. The objective is to explore how the Black body undergoes ontological truncation through performances of white embodiment. The talk gestures at rethinking white racism as a site not simply perpetuated by self-ascribed white supremacist groups, but by everyday forms of white embodiment. In this way, embodied whiteness always already belies white "innocence." If this is so, I suggest that white embodiment needs to un-suture and be in a state of embodied crisis.
BIO
Dr. George Yancy is Professor of Philosophy at Emory University. He received his BA in philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh (with honors). His first MA in philosophy is from Yale University, and he obtained his second MA from New York University in Africana Studies, where he received the distinguished Henry M. MacCracken Fellowship. He received his PhD from Duquesne University (with distinction) and was the first graduate student to receive the McAnulty Fellowship in the Department of Philosophy. He is the author, editor, and co-editor of over 20 books. Three of his books were named CHOICE Outstanding Academic Books. His book, Black Bodies, White Gazes, received an Honorable Mention from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights. His co-edited book, Our Black Sons Matter was listed by Booklist as a Top Ten Diverse Nonfiction Book. He is known for his influential essays and interviews in The New York Times' philosophy Column, The Stone. He has twice won the American Philosophical Committee on Public Philosophy's Op-Ed Contest. Yancy's three most recent books are the second (and expanded) edition of Black Bodies, White Gazes (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017); On Race: 34 Conversations in a Time of Crisis (Oxford University Press, 2017) and his authored book, Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly About Racism in America (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018). Regarding Backlash, Noam Chomsky writes, “George Yancy’s courageous appeal to White America “to confront the problem of whiteness; to cultivate a critical awareness of the specter of whiteness and white privilege that each one of you inherits” elicited a remarkable range of responses, some hideous beyond words, some welcoming what he rightly called a “gift.” This eloquent meditation on the events and their meaning calls on us, with piercing honesty, to think hard, and work hard, to excise the malignancy of white supremacy from our culture and our lives.” Yancy is currently at work on 2 edited (Buddhism and Whiteness: Critical Reflections, and Educating for Critical Consciousness) and 2 authored books (Thinking Across Black Spaces and Breaking the Silence: What Happens When Men Talk Honestly about Their Sexism.