MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | TAKE CARE  | SPRING 2023

Wayward Wynterians: Reading the Aesthetic's Violence Against the Humanist Grain

Henry Washington, Jr. • Wesleyan University 

April 17th @ 6pm • Daniel Family Commons

Sylvia Wynter’s groundbreaking critique of the Aesthetic intervenes in the common underestimation of its role in helping to naturalize, and thus fortify, Humanism’s hierarchies. This presentation engages that critique in order to address its arguable conflict with Wynter’s simultaneous investment in the black Aesthetic’s ostensible radicality. Can the black Aesthetic really be thought to transcend dominant representation’s violent procedures of sense-making? And indeed, what is black about the black Aesthetic? Might critics’ investments in seeing the black Aesthetic as always already an intervention into Humanism’s violence disallow us to see what is really there? Ultimately, the talk endeavors to outline a way of taking seriously the invaluable insight of Wynter’s Aesthetic critique that stops short of reiterating its ironic investment in Humanist possibility.

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