MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | TAKE CARE  | SPRING 2023

Looking Out; or, How to Carefully Read A Record of Racial Violence

Autumn Womack • Princeton University 

April 3rd @ 6pm • Daniel Family Commons

This talk excavates two registers of the word care – responsibility and management – and the way they underpin critical debates about Black futures at the turn of the 20th-century. While care has come to denote ethical social practices, throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, the rhetoric of care was also the justification for violent processes of racial categorization and classification. This talk teases out the stakes of care – ethical social practice and vigilance – through returning to an archival story of the Bakers, a family who survived an 1898 lynching in South Carolina before ending up at the center of a multi-media anti-lynching performance spectacle. Paying particular attention to a series of photographs of the family that were produced in the aftermath of the attempted lynching, I argue for a mode of ethically, or carefully, reading archives of racial violence.

Take Care
View Spring 2023 Lecture List

Center for the Humanities · 95 Pearl Street, Middletown, CT 06459
www.wesleyan.edu/humanities