Keynote 2: Che Gossett (Room 121)
Title:“Null and Void: Racial Capitalism and Black Art in the Historical Present”
Abstract: Racial capitalism is the afterlife of slavery, as Black studies scholars such as Justin Leroy, Sara Maria Sorentino, Nick Nesbitt, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, as well as business and labor historians Caitlin C. Rosenthal theoretically traced and historically substantiated. I consider how Black artists not only historicize but also contemporize (place in the historical present) the entanglement of racial slavery and racial capitalism. I focus in particular on the work of artist and 2019 MacArthur grantee, Cameron Rowland. The racial calculus of reparations is inverted through Rowland’s practice of turning unpayable debt into a form of racial haunting and museological ghosting. Market aesthetics are undermined and as the museum is burdened with infinite, unpayable debt. Rowlands act of in-stall-ation enacts a fictive capital relation wherein the museum-state complexes’s internal workings are short-circuited and the edifice is swallowed up by the abyss of fiscal insolvency.
Bio:
Che Gossett is a Black non binary femme writer and critical theorist specializing in queer/trans studies, aesthetic theory, abolitionist thought and black study. They are the Racial Justice Postdoctoral Fellow at the Initiative for a Just Society, Columbia Law School, and a visiting fellow at Harvard Law School, in the Animal Law and Policy Program. Che received their doctorate in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers University, New Brunswick in May 2021. They received a BA in African American Studies from Morehouse College, an MAT in Social Studies from Brown University, an MA in History from the University of Pennsylvania and were a 2019-2020 Helena Rubenstein Fellow in the Whitney Independent Study Program. Che received a Ruth Stephan Fellowship from Beinecke Library at Yale University for the summer of 2022, to research the papers of queer feminist filmmaker Barbara Hammer. Gossett has been a fellow at the Centre for Life Writing at Wolfson College, Oxford University, as well as the Centre for Visual Culture and Corpus Christi College at the University of Cambridge.
Currently, Gosset is finishing two manuscripts for Duke University Press–the first being a political biography of AIDS activist Kiyoshi Kuromiya, and the second emerging out of their dissertation, theorizing the ways in which abolition is activated in Black contemporary art. Gossett has co-edited a special issue of TSQ “Trans in a Time of HIV/AIDS” with Professor Eva Hayward, and their syllabus on trans and non-binary methods for art and art history co-authored with Professor David Getsy won the College Art Journal Award for Distinction. For the fall semester of 2023, they are in residence as assistant professor/visiting scholar at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Gossett will be presenting advance work from the manuscript in progress on the activation of abolition in Black contemporary art.
Respondent: Kristina Huang
Kristina Huang specializes in African diasporic literatures from the vantage point of the eighteenth-century transatlantic world. My research and teaching engage with methods from Caribbean Studies, Black Studies, Cultural Studies, and social movement histories through the Black Atlantic world. As an interdisciplinary scholar and educator, her work centers on historical representations of subaltern, enslaved, and minoritized lives and how those representations inform critical theory, literary study, and political practice.
She have also written a range of short essays (from reviews of academic work and contemporary fiction to short-form pieces about race and the university) alongside interviews with artists on how their research on Caribbean History and Black History in Britain informs their creative practices. These essays have appeared in various online and print publications: Small Axe Salon, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and the Lincoln Center Theatre Blog, Social Text Online, Warscapes, Restoration and 18th Century Theatre Research, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal.