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Black Light: On the Origin and Materiality of Blackness
03 May 2023, 4:00 pm–6:00 pm
qUCL and GFRN are delighted to welcome Zakiyyah Iman Jackson for their joint annual lecture 2023. With respondent, Christine Okoth (KCL).
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All | UCL staff | UCL students
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
Institute of Advanced Studies
Location
-
Harrie Massey Lecture TheatreE28,25 Gordon Street, LondonWC1H 0AYUnited Kingdom
Aesthesis is a political matter, such that black folk have often sought to challenge a mode of representation that mythologizes blackness as mere absence or lack. There is artmaking that seeks to transfigure both the void blackness is thought to represent and a known world whose “facts” depend on a fiction of black vacancy. These are works that, in the words of curator, Adrienne Edwards, “are philosophically charged, culturally compounded abstractions” and figurations “that point to discourse beyond medium and art movements,” alternately affirming nothing or attuning to the indeterminacy and incalculability of blackness, whether blackness be attributed to person, place, or thing. Perception and its organization are meaningful and necessarily remain a ground of contestation.
This essay concerns the refractive potentialities of blackness as well as its density or fullness that exceed the capture of mimetic representation. It highlights works that critically explore the received terms and limits of representation in the interest of the dissolution of given categories and conceptual forms. Focusing particular attention on Faith Ringgold’s Black Light and American People series, this talk both demonstrates that the idea of “the black female” is pivotal in mediating the relation between abstraction and figuration in modern art and our social worlds as well as considers related works that reposition blackness as incalculable density and a light source in its own right.
Please register to attend and familiarise yourself with our Code of Conduct.
About the Speakers
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson
Associate Professor of English and Director of the Center for Feminist Research at University of Southern California
Her research explores the literary and aesthetic aspects of Western philosophical and scientific discourse and investigates the engagement of African diasporic literature, film, and visual art with the historical concerns, knowledge claims, and rhetoric of Western science and philosophy. Professor Jackson is the author of Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. Becoming Human is the winner of the Harry Levin First Book Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association, the Gloria Anzaldúa Book Award from the National Women’s Studies Association, the Lambda Literary Book Award for LGBTQ Studies and is featured in Artforum magazine's “Best of 2021” issue.
Professor Jackson is at work on a second book, tentatively titled “Obscure Light: Blackness and the Derangement of Sex/Gender.” The project provides a critique of biocentrism (or biological reductionism and determinism) and elucidates what Jackson argues is the indistinction of sex/gender and race. It maintains that antiblackness constitutes the bedrock of modern Western logics of sex/gender, in science and philosophy, and meditates on the transfiguring potentialities of blackness. Jackson’s work has appeared in scholarly journals such as Feminist Studies, e-flux, Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience in addition to exhibition catalogues for the Whitney Museum, Hammer Museum, and The Studio Museum of Harlem.
More about Zakiyyah Iman JacksonChristine Okoth
Lecturer in Literatures and Cultures of the Black Atlantic at King's College London
She is currently working on a book project entitled Race and the Raw Material, which shows how contemporary Black writers and artists use the materials of literature – particularly those relating to genre - to excavate a set of racial logics that emerge against the backdrop of raw materials extraction.
More about Christine Okoth