2023-24 Speaker Series

Each year The Speaker Series brings in several visiting guest lecturers. Speakers over the years have included Jean Baudrillard, Lauren Berlant, Peter Brooks, Norman Bryson, David Carroll, Anthony Cascardi, Wlad Godzich, Jean-Joseph Goux, Elizabeth Grosz, N. Katherine Hayles, Linda Hutcheon, Martin Jay, Michael Hardt, Agnes Heller, Barbara Johnson, David Farrell Krell, Murray Krieger, Arthur Kroker, Dominick LaCapra, Jerome McGann, J. Hillis Miller, Chantal Mouffe, Christopher Norris, Mark Poster, Richard Rorty, Charles Scott, Thomas Sebeok, Kaja Silverman, Gayatri Spivak, Bernard Stiegler, Samuel Weber, Hayden White, Slavoj Žižek, and many others.

Upcoming speakers:   

November 6, 2023
4:00 p.m. EST

Dr. Mariana Ortega

Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, 
Women's, Gender, and Sexualities Studies, and Latina/o Studies
The Pennsylvania State University

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Carnal Light and Border Crossing, Sensing a Photographic Archive of Feeling Brown

In this presentation, I discuss Verónica Gabriela Cárdenas’s latest  photographic series, Del Rio, which documents a 2021 Haitian migrant caravan arriving at the Mexico-U.S. border in search of asylum.  Following José Esteban Muñoz, I read the photographs as a carnal archive of “feeling brown.” I discuss Muñoz’s notion of feeling brown with attention to two main issues, brownness as shared sense of harm and brownness as commons. I read Cárdenas photographs as carnal in so far as they are the sensory circuits through which feeling brown is transmitted.   This reading opens the possibility for an aesthetic unsettlement in which the Mexico-U.S. border may be reinterpreted so as to expand our understanding of border experience and avoid the invisibilizing of Black Latinidad. It also highlights the heterogeneous, communal, and coalitional aspect of feeling brown.   

Watch some of our previous talks on YouTube

Past Speakers:

Gabriel Rockhill
Ideology, Art & Class Struggle
October 5, 2023

Rocío Zambrana
Metamorphosis of Value: Epistemic Protocols in the Long 17th Century
April 3, 2023

Alia Al-Saji
Making the Colonial Past Hesitate: Fanon, amputation, and a politics of refusal
March 13, 2023

Kirill Chepurin
Cross-Scalar Romanticism
November 15, 2022

Denise Ferreira da Silva
Deep implicancy
October 17, 2022

Eldritch Priest
Presque Rêvé (or, To Want To Be a Metaphor)
April 20, 2022

Shona N. Jackson
Beyond Constraint: Labour, Grammar, and Desire
April 13, 2022