Keynote 2: Che Gossett (Room 121)
Title:“Null and Void: Racial Capitalism and Black Art in the Historical Present”
*Please note that this lecture will be presented on Zoom. Audience members will have the option to watch in the lecture hall or on personal devices.
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 associate director of the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer and Trans Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to returning to Penn — where they received an M.A. in History — they were the Racial Justice Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia Law School from 2021-23, and a Animal Law and Policy fellow at Harvard Law School from 2022-2024. Gossett has published work in anthologies such as Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (MIT Press, 2018), and is co-editor, with Yale University African American Studies professor Tavia Nyong’o, of a forthcoming Social Text journal special issue on Sylvia Wynter, culture, and technics. They are the recipient of a 2024 Creative Capital Andy Warhol Writers Grant for their book project on Marlon Riggs, queer cinema and the Black radical tradition.
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.