A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia with Amy Hollywood (Harvard University), Terrence L. Johnson (Georgetown University), and Joseph R. Winters (Duke University).
In 2001, Anne Anlin Cheng posed a question that still remains today: "How does an individual go from being a subject of grief to being a subject of grievance? What political and psychical gains or losses transpire in the process?" On the one hand, widespread anti-Black police violence appears to call for immediate redress, political action, and agency. On the other hand, political expediency and fear may foreclose lines of inquiry into psychical injury and social histories of racial violence just as the logics of commensurability and quantifiability that undergird attempts to legally redress racial injury fail to address losses that are incommensurable and unquantifiable. Through an engagement with psychoanalysis and literature, this dialogue will explore the racial politics of mourning and address the tensions between grief and grievance, between mourning and militancy, and between reparations, redress, healing, and resistance.
This event is part of the Department of Comparative Literature's "In Dialogue" series and is presented with the generous support of the Divinity School, the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.
Please email the event organizer, Prof Kris Trujillo (kjtrujillo@uchicago.edu) or department administrator, Ingrid Sagor (isagor@uchicago.edu) for the zoom link and password to attend.
Date: October 23, 2020
Time: 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM
Date: October 23, 2020
Time: 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM