2020 CARL WEBER MEMORIAL LECTURE + SEMINAR
FEATURING SPECIAL GUEST FRED MOTEN
POET and PROFESSOR (TISCH NYU)
PUBLIC LECTURE
THURSDAY MARCH 05 at 6PM in PIGOTT THEATER
FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
available empathy
Stanford TAPS welcomes special guest Fred Moten, presenter of the 2020 Carl Weber Memorial Lecture, “available empathy.”
In Arthur Jafa’s film Dreams Are Colder Than Death, Hortense Spillers considers the vexed relation between the enslaved black woman’s “availability in the flesh” to white slave masters and empathy. “The flesh gives empathy,” she says. Let’s consider not only the content of what she says but also the poetics of her saying. What’s the relation between an amazing caesura that both divides and animates her meditation and the idea or notion of crisis — and its related/derivative terms critique and criticism — particularly in the ways these terms are operative now in black studies? How might the refusal of ontological terror that black study would enact join the withdrawal from ontological dependence that performance studies ought to practice?
ABOUT FRED MOTEN
Fred Moten is Poet and Professor in the Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts. He holds an A.B. from Harvard and a Ph. D from the University of California, Berkeley.
Moten teaches courses and conducts research in black studies, performance studies, poetics and critical theory. He is author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Hughson’s Tavern (Leon Works, 2009); B. Jenkins (Duke University Press, 2010); The Feel Trio (Letter Machine Editions, 2014), The Little Edges (Wesleyan University Press, 2015), The Service Porch(Letter Machine Editions, 2016), a three-volume collection of essays whose general title is consent not to be a single being (Duke University Press, 2017, 2018) and All that Beauty (Letter Machine Editions, 2019). Moten is also co-author, with Stefano Harney, of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, 2013) and A Poetics of the Undercommons (Sputnik and Fizzle, 2016) and, with Wu Tsang, of Who touched me? (If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution, 2016). Moten has served on the editorial boards of Callaloo, Discourse, American Quarterly and Social Text; as a member of the Critical Theory Institute at the University of California, Irvine; on the board of directors of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, City University of New York; and on the advisory board of Issues in Critical Investigation, Vanderbilt University.
DEPARTMENT SEMINAR
FRIDAY MARCH 06 at NOON in ROBLE GYM LOUNGE
OPEN to TAPS STUDENTS, FACULTY, and STAFF
“FOREGIVENNESS AND NONPERFORMANCE”
Professor Moten leads this guest seminar on “Foregivenness and Nonperformance.” This event will serve as the First Friday event for March.
In this seminar, Professor Moten will expand on the ideas presented in his lecture by examining Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, focusing on two main sections called “Open Boat” and “Relation.”
“Poetics of Relation” Full PDF
“Poetics of Relation” Excerpts Only
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