The Physics of Black Art Or, Must Blackness Be Visible?

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.

The Physics of Black Art Or, Must Blackness Be Visible?

Michelle M. Wright author of The Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Epistemology of the Middle Passage, discusses the complex politics around "Black Art", and why Black visual artists are often at odds with academic theorists of Black identity on the nature and notion of Blackness. Beginning with the twinned concepts of history and race, Wright's lecture takes us through philosophy, geography, theoretical particle physics and the visual arts to finally answer the question if Blackness must be visible in art.
 
Michelle M. Wright is the College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, where she teaches courses in African American and Black European literary traditions, as well as seminars on theorizing race and belonging in Black and African Diaspora Studies. She is the author of Becoming Black: creating identity in the African diaspora (2004) and Physics of Blackness: beyond the Middle Passage epistemology (2015), and is currently at work on a new project, tentatively titled Afroeuropolis and the Agency of Space, which looks at how Black writers from across the Diaspora imagine the space of Western Europe. 

In conversation with Ellen Nyman PhD student.

Read more about the research project: FutureBrownSpace

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