Glimpses of Aliveness: Pleasure and Subject Making in Black Diasporic Visual Culture

• Date: February 17, 2022
• Time: 2:00 pm—3:30 pm
• Location: Lecture Hall

• Speakers

  • Darius Bost, Professor of Black Studies and Gender & Women Studies – University of Illnois
  • Petal Samuel, Assistant Professor of African, African American and Diaspora Studies – University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  • Dagmawi Woubshet, Ahuja Family Presidential Associate Professor of English – University of Pennsylvania
  
  

• Moderator/s

  • GerShun Avilez, Professor of English – University of Maryland, College Park

Glimpses of Aliveness

Pleasure and Subject Making in Black Diasporic Visual Culture

Kevin Quashie explores how Black women artists navigate racialized vulnerability without letting the reality of vulnerability become the fact of Blackness or all there is to know about it in Black Aliveness, Or A Poetics of Being. He describes this careful navigation as the struggle to be alive or Black aliveness. Inspired by this concept of aliveness and the understanding of racialized and gender vulnerability that is real but not all-encompassing, this panel turns to visual culture to explore how Black artists express identity while also questioning accepted ideas about their subject position. The papers suggest that visual experimentation becomes a means for relaying the “aliveness” of Black subjectivity.  In “Marsha’s Smile: (Un)Documenting Black Trans Visual Histories,” Darius Bost discusses the numerous images of Marsha P. Johnson’s smile, and how her iconic image as a figure of “black feminine joy” has been put to use by contemporary queer subjects as a source of emotional rescue. He tracks and reads various photographs of Johnson to demonstrate how her iconicity and the historical fascination with her life and death has overshadowed her complex personhood. Continuing the focus on photography, Dagmawi Woubshet attends to the photographic series of Zanele Muholi in “The Right to Look.” He argues that on display in the series are forms of gender embodiment and expression that are so playful and capacious that quantifying and qualifying them simply as butch and femme or cis and trans would miss the mark. He points to the terms of the human gaze and the camera’s as well as the protocols of appearance and enfleshment to explore the prerogatives of black queer life—including its right to play. GerShun Avilez turns his attention to Mickalene Thomas’s paintings and collages in “Seeing Gratification.” He explains how Thomas’s work resists an investment in the “culture of dissemblance” that has defined Black women’s actions historically and emphasizes communal playfulness and “excess flesh” as a way to define individual identity and situate the private in to the realm commonly understood to be public. Further expanding the scope of the panel, Petal Samuel focuses on the relationship between the sonic and the visual in “The Pleasures of Tinnitus: Diasporic Placemaking, Policing, and the Medicalization of Anti-Noise Rhetoric.” Samuel examines a social rhetoric that embraces the supposedly deleterious physiological effects of exposure to noise and casts them instead as pleasurable. She considers the filmmaker Sean Frank to illustrate the perverse pleasures of the physio-neurological effects of noise exposure and to highlight the social, cultural, and psychological value of so-called “noise” as a mechanism of placemaking for Caribbean diasporic communities.  Moving from photography to painting and film and encompassing sound studies, queer theory, and affect studies, this panel offers a set of theories about Black Diasporic subjectivity that emerges through surprising representations of pleasure. The visual media examined provide glimpses of Black aliveness and situate the visual as an important conduit for this complex set of social negotiations.