Séminaire salle 126, site Saint-Charles (bâtiment 1), 18h
In Gender and the Abjection of Blackness (SUNY Press 2018) Sabine Broeck argues that gender theory, and to a large extent white gender studies, "as we know it" have evaded, dismissed or ignored the critical relevance of enslavism (slavery and its "afterlife", as Saidiya Hartman has called it) for a theoretical analysis of the late postmodern moment. In consequence, the theory of gender difference as such has partaken in and bolstered anti-blackness, in that it has relied on the prerequisite existence of the black/slave as philosophical foil, to make an argument of and for women's freedom as human beings.
In this talk, Broeck will discuss questions and theoretical concepts: anti-black abjection, enslavism and afro-pessimist critique. Focused on the recent turn to posthumanism in Rosi Braidotti's work, she will present some of Braidotti's key theses with regard to posthumanism, as well as a critique of those theoretical assumptions for their anti-black subtextual currencies.
Prof. Dr. Sabine Broeck teaches English-Speaking Cultures and Transnational /Transcultural Studies at the University of Bremen. Her research critiques the coloniality and anti-blackness of transatlantic modernity as a social formation and culture of enslavism. She was president of the international scholarly organization Collegium for African American Research (CAAR) from 2007 to 2015, and director of the University of Bremen Institute for Postcolonial and Transcultural Studies (INPUTS) until 2015. She published two monographs, Der entkolonisierte Koerper (1988) and White Amnesia-Black Memory? American Women’s Writing and History (1999). Recently she edited, with Stella Bolaki, Audre Lorde’s Transnational Legacies, University of Massachusetts Press 2015, as well as, with Jason Ambroise, Black Knowledges/Black Struggles: Essays in Critical Epistemology, Liverpool University Press, 2015.
See further publications at academia.edu and for more information see:
http://www.fb10.uni-bremen.de/lehrpersonal/broeck.aspx.
https://www.sunypress.edu/p-6595-gender-and-the-abjection-of-bla.aspx