Keynote 3: Jennifer González (Room 121)*
Title: “Lessons of The Hour: Isaac Julien’s Time Travel”
*The film Lessons of The Hour by Isaac Julien will be screened on April 11, 5 PM at Pyle Center Room 121.
Abstract: Visualizing abolition means imagining the world differently. As George Lamming, Stuart Hall, bell hooks fand subsequent scholars articulate: we have to train ourselves not only with new ways of looking, but also new ways of seeing, if we are going to move past racialized hierarchies and cultural ignorance. Artists working across cinema, photography, and performance, produce eddies alongside the digital stream of information that threatens to engulf us on a daily basis. Lyricism, poetry, and intimacy are all domains in which the visual allows us to rethink stereotype, and reject cruelty. Centering on Isaac Julian’s Lessons of the Hour, inspired by Frederick Douglass’s lecture of the same name, this talk invites us to look at the ways historical discourse develops diverse visual formations that press against the present in non-narrative, tropological ways. If the archive is less a record of the past than a promise made to the future, Julien’s persistent engagement with the visual textures of time activates an imagined future that has already come to pass.
Bio:
Jennifer Gonzalez is Patricia and Rowland Rebele Chair and Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a faculty member in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York. Her research engages theoretical discourses of feminism, diaspora, and decoloniality in contemporary art. Her publications appear in journals such as, Camera Obscura, Art Journal, Bomb, and Aztlán and her books include Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art and Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology which was included in the top art books of the decade in 2020 by ArtNews magazine.
Respondent: Guillermina De Ferrari
Guillermina De Ferrari is Halls-Bascom Professor of Caribbean Literatures and Visual Cultures in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and an affiliate in the Department of Art History. She is the author of Vulnerable States: Bodies of Memory in Contemporary Caribbean Fiction (Virginia 2007), and Community and Culture in Post-Soviet Cuba (Routledge 2014). Trained as a comparatist (Columbia University, 2001), she has published many articles on Cuba and Caribbean literature, photography, art and visual culture, and world literature. She directed the Center for Visual Cultures (2014-2018), and curated the exhibition Apertura: Photography in Cuba Today (Chazen Museum of Art 2015). She co-edited with Ursula Heise (UCLA) the Routledge Series Literature and Contemporary Thought (2014-2022). She co-edited with Mariano Siskind (Harvard University) The Routledge Companion to 20th and 21st Century Latin American Literary and Cultural Forms (2022). She was a Senior Fellow with the Institute of Research in the Humanities (2018-2023) and a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow. Her book Broken Tropics: Arts of Contingency in Puerto Rico, Cuba and Haiti is forthcoming in the Studies on Latin American Art series with the University of California Press. Her research combines cultural studies, ethics, sociology and ethnography.