Guest Lecture: Michelle M. Wright (Emory University) |Blackness & Time |June 14 2022 | 4:40 pm |W48/0.04

Date and Time:
Tuesday, June 14 2022 , 4:40 pm 
Wiener Str. 48, 01219 Dresden
Room 00.4

What is Blackness? Despite some 53 years of Black Studies, few scholars have
ventured to actually define Blackness. Because race is not a biological category—
there is no such thing as a ‘Black gene”, and each nation defines race differently—
exactly “what” makes Blackness becomes more and more elusive the deeper we
search.

In this talk, Michelle M. Wright argues that in order to answer this question we
must change its premise. Blackness, she argues, is not so much a ‘what’ as a
‘when’ and ‘where’. By going back to modern Europe’s original notions of time,
derived from Newton, Wright shows how spacetime itself is warped around race,
and how putting contemporary African diasporic writing in conversation with
theoretical particle physics, we can arrive at definitions of Blackness that are
more accurate and inclusive—and constantly updating themselves.

Michelle M. Wright is the Emory University College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished
Professor of English in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. She is an expert and prolific scholar in the
field of American Studies, with specializations in African American and Black Diaspora
Studies, Black Queer, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, as well as Science Studies.
Wright’s book publications include Becoming Black: Creating an Identity in the African
Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2004) and Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle
Passage Epistemology (University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

This lecture is part of the Lecturer on Tour format, which also includes
stopovers at the universities of Leipzig, Jena, Halle and Erfurt.
It is organized by the Chair of American Studies
with a Focus on Diversity Studies at the Institute of English
and American Studies, TU Dresden, and generously
funded by the U.S. Consulate General Leipzig.

Flyer here.