Marquis Bey – Ordinary Black Radicality

This seminar series is part of “A Season of Black Study” and curated by the research project FutureBrownSpace, an initiative of Afro-Diasporic practitioners, based in Black Studies, dedicated to creating nourishing spaces for people of the global majority to develop their projects (of art, of being, of activism or community) and for anyone who wishes to appreciate, and join in its significance for a more coalitional, less neo-colonial future; whether your access to Black Study is through the brown, the decolonial, the neurodivergent, whether you find black affinities with your class struggle, gender battles or variously abled superpowers, if you can move with it, tremble with it, let it break you out of abstraction and shake some non-censored sense into you, then you can be with us in Black Study.

This Season brings together artists, researchers and organizers from Sweden, performance art and theatre from South Africa, and scholars from the U.S, to share the interdisciplinary, aesthetic and transcultural nature of black study.

Marquis Bey – Ordinary Black Radicality

This talk will offer thoughts on how the black radical tradition—or, a radical notion of blackness—is woven through the ordinary. In supplementation to more spectacular acts of radical work like protests and demonstrations and riots, this talk shares the radicality of the ordinary: the quotidian, everyday practices of refusal and cultivation of life stolen from coloniality, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy.

Dr. Marquis Bey is Professor of Black Studies and Gender & Sexuality Studies, with appointments in English and Critical Theory, at Northwestern University. Their work focuses on trans and nonbinary studies, black feminist theory, abolition, and black radical thought. They are the author, most recently, of Black Trans Feminism and Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender (both published with Duke University Press, 2022). Learn more about their work at marquisbey.com.

Read more about the research project: FutureBrownSpace

Read more about the Seminar serie: A Season of Black study