On 3/23 Amrit Trewn and Myself have organized a panel "Blackness as Archipelago" to develop the archipelagic framework with five unique persepctives at Black Portraitures "The Color of Silence," held at Harvard University. Panel description below:
This panel considers islands as both sites and conceptual positions for black futures. The scholars and artists will explore both the material and socio-political conditions that islands may produce: isolation and enclosure, dependencies and linkages, peripheral fugitivities and radical political subjectivities. What do we gain from thinking about blackness as Archipelago? How do the material effects of racial-capitalism manifest in similarly bounded experiences around the globe? And how can thinking about blackness in this way open new lines of inquiry into the study of black social, political, and ecological experience? These presentations learn from the poetry of Édouard Glissant, Derek Walcott, and Kamau Braithwaite as well as scholarship of Carmen Beatriz Llenín Figueroa, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, and Michelle Stephens, who have long theorized the archipelago in relation to being, the continental, and blackness. Ayasha Guerin (NYU, American Studies), Amrit Trewn (NYU, American Studies), Lindiwe Malindi (University of the Witwatersrand, Sociology), Ron Morisson (University of Southern California, Cinematic Arts) and Justin French (Photographer, New York) will model methodologies for attending to images and cartographies of island-spaces that imagine alternative black futures.
