Event Host: Arts and Humanities
Short Description: Humans are a failed species: full of violence against one another and the planet that sustains us, we seem unable to constrain our destructive impulses, despite our ongoing self-congratulatory celebrations of the rational. Drawing on theoretical work in both decolonial and black studies, this lecture frames the problem of “the human” through the question of its emergence, rather than its demise or eclipse.
Humans are a failed species: full of violence against one another and the planet that sustains us, we seem unable to constrain our destructive impulses, despite our ongoing self-congratulatory celebrations of the rational. Drawing on theoretical work in both decolonial and black studies, this lecture frames the problem of “the human” through the question of its emergence, rather than its demise or eclipse.
The lecture, given by Shannon Winnubst of the Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, will explore accounts that locate the emergence of the universalizing idiom of “the human” in the 15th century contemporaneous developments of Renaissance humanism and European (especially Iberian) colonialism, thereby locking the figure of the human directly into the violence of colonialist racialization. By rotating the geohistoric axis of paradigms of both humanism and the concept of race from normative 18th-19th century northern European-northern American accounts, I will speculate on what this might tell us about the ontology of one of the most disturbing social phenomena of our contemporary times: mind-blowing racism.
Reception will accompany each lecture. Free and open to the public.