Speaker:
Kimberly Bain
Assistant Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, UBC
Talk title:
Sensing Ground
Kevin Beasley, Untitled (2020). Hand-carved ebony figurines, crystal, clear resin. 60 x 45 x 30 cm.
Talk Abstract:
How might we orient ourselves to a practice of sensing ground? The flow of venture capital and geological matter has organized both Blackness and mineral under a racial capitalist metonymic and material equivalency. This is the ugly persistence of antiblackness in and as ecology. First, bodies marked as Black become the technology by which the extraction of raw materials and resources from the earth might be achieved. And as Blackness and Black flesh are continually (re)figured as a space of raw material, the extraction of geologic material —gold, silver, coal, and so forth — and the histories of antiblack racial capitalism continue. Empire’s extractive greed is a story of antiblackness; to feed itself the hand of Empire digs deep into the earth and global Black life. How, then, do we sense (or sound out) antiblack relations to the inhuman—to gold, to glitter, to cobalt, to coltan? This vignette considers the 2021 film Neptune Frost to point us to the function of sound in not only mounting critique but also being a way to sense the earth. Via sensing ground we begin to slip into modes of Black critique and life that moves bodies and moves through bodies, affording us a way to alchemize antiblack violence.
Speaker Bio:
Dr. Bain’s most pressing and urgent scholarly and critical-creative pursuits have consolidated around the history, theory, and philosophy of the African diaspora, race, gender, environmental and medical racism, the Anthropocene, and Black arts and letters.
She is currently working on two scholarly monographs. The first, entitled On Black Breath, traces a genealogy of breathing and Blackness in the United States. Her second book, Black Alchemy: Dirt, Soil and Other Dark Matter, digs into soil for understanding how Blackness has shaped global considerations of the Anthropocene and refused the extractive relations of racial capitalism.
Dr. Bain regularly teaches survey and specialized courses on 19th century through contemporary Black and American arts and cultures, literary and critical theory, and Black feminist and queer thought.
This is hybrid event hosted in Geog 229 and on zoom.