Black Woman at the Podium: The Ecstasy and Noise of Kathleen Collins's Losing Ground
Time: March 7, 2024, 4 p.m. - 6 p.m.
Location: Kilian Room, 500 Hall of Languages
RESCHEDULED FROM FALL!
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (University of Southern California)
This talk thinks with Kathleen Collins’s groundbreaking 1982 film, Losing Ground, and theses on aesthetics by Sylvia Wynter, Audre Lorde, Aime Césaire, and Jacques Derrida. Rather than cast the problem of representation in familiar terms of “invisibility” or “misrepresentation,” the problem is that of function. “Black womanhood,” as self cancellation, grounds representation: a necessary administrative and distributive function for the vertical arrangement of sexual differences in both the history of Western philosophy and cinema. This problem-space is burdened with organizing the modern terms of the conceptualization and the representational legibility of sex/gender and sexuality.
Professor Jackson's latest book project critiques biocentrism (or biological reductionism and determinism) and elucidates the indistinction of sex/gender and race. This work has implications not only for Black Literary Studies and Philosophy, but also for studies in gender and sexuality, science and technology, and art history. Jackson’s first book, Becoming Human, interrogates the “human” in the “humanities” in ways that have reshaped the field. It links humanist research to our shared vision and mission at Syracuse University for diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Additional supporters:
- African American Studies
- Anthropology
- Art and Music Histories
- English
- Office of DEIA
- Philosophy
- Religion
- School of Education
- Sociology
- Syracuse University Humanities Center
- Writing Studies, Rhetoric, and Composition