Julie Carlson and Sowon Park, in their co-presentation of the “Racing Minds” initiative through the Literature and Mind center at UCSB, will speak about the issues of race and racism in research protocols and how this influences a cognitively-grounded study of racialization. Given the WEIRDness of the mind/brains that have produced findings in cognitive studies (Joseph Henrich) as well as the biases that are inherent in western conceptions of thought, “Racing Minds” is committed to investigating cognitive and affective dimensions of racialization from the avowed perspective that thought is rarely neutral. Their aim is to probe some of the grounding assumptions and terms that themselves bespeak a white-identified and white-serving environment.
The panel will afford special attention to the aesthetics, performances, and affects of racialized blackness. Stephanie Batiste will discuss research from her current book, The SpacesBetween: Black Performances of Violence and Death in Millennial Los Angeles, which examines the ways black Angelenos and others have used practices of performance and community organization to negotiate the pressures of knowing and experiencing home as a crucible of violence. Far from simply producing “awareness,” Batiste argues that these works take aim at the “heart,” seeking a physical embodied response inspired by text and performance, a transfer from one individual to another through reaching out across the fourth wall of the stage and/or the surrounding space of the subject in spherical centrifugal of influence. These performances cajole, provoke and invite, conjuring what Omi Osun Joni L. Jones calls resonant frequencies, a transformative relationship between performers, performance, and audience. By focusing on urban violence, race, affect, and trauma, Batiste explores how the production of resonance, of what she calls kinetic affect, operates in theater space and the degree to which the magic of performance might transform a larger world.
Michael L. Thomas will discuss “The Aesthetic Experience of Blackness” in relation to his current book research. He will explore the connection between aesthetic experience and racialization as a point of synthesis between sociological, psychological, and political ontologies of race and racism. Following Paul Taylor's linkage between Black Aesthetics and Black Lifeworlds along with Monique Roelofs' work on aesthetics and culture, Thomas studies how practices of aesthetic judgment, creation, and analysis open a field to examine how racialization and aestheticization work in tandem to justify and normalize practices of exploitation and domination that characterize racial modernity. From this foundation, he explores racial “mindedness” or “consciousness” as a matter of aesthetic orientation that links cognition with forms of sensibility that can generate synthetic approaches to racial analysis and possibilities for world building. During the discussion, he will offer examples from James Baldwin and Michael Sawyer, and Louis Gordon to illustrate his approach.
Kevin Quashie will begin from the following question: in literary representations, what does it mean for “race” to come to mind for the one who is black? That is, what does it mean for racial blackness, embodied variously, to come to mind as an object of thought or consciousness? Black thinkers have regularly addressed this question in scenes that try to dramatize—conceptualize—the “come to mind” moment; these include Zora Neale Hurston (“How It Feels to Be Colored Me”), W.E.B. DuBois (“Of Our Spiritual Strivings”), Grant Farred (Martin Heidegger Saved My Life), Sharon P. Holland (The Erotic Life of Racism), Hortense Spillers (the opening of “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”), Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man), Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye and Sula), Frantz Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks), Reginald Shepherd (“On Not Being White”). In considering some of these moments, the moment of race-coming-to-mind is, in another way, race-coming-to-the-body, blackness coming anew to the body. And by invoking embodiment, the matter of gender (and gendering) bears on what racial consciousness can be. Quashie asks: What is it for the black subject to say “that is me,” what are the convulses of recognition (and misrecognition) that such a claim requires?
The presentations will be short in order to allow for the maximum time for discussion and exchange. The panel format will allow the speakers to engage with each other first, and then respond to questions from the audience.