Mack Lecture: Frank Wilderson, Arthur Jafa, and Saidiya Hartman in conversation

Join writer Frank B Wilderson III, artist Arthur Jafa, and writer Saidiya Hartman for this live online conversation and Q&A. Collectively, these speakers come from distinct and notable practices and are at the forefront of the critical thinking about Blackness today. As writers, Hartman and Wilderson have both made vital contributions to the study of historical and current conditions of Black life in America. Alongside Hartman and Wilderson’s critical writing, Jafa’s career as an artist has continually challenged and reimagined how Blackness is rendered in images. In this open discussion, the speakers will reflect on their work on Afropessimism, Black Death, and fugitivity in relation to the condition of living, as Hartman has characterized it, in the “afterlife of slavery.”

This conversation will be moderated by Patrice D. Douglas, assistant professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley.

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About the speakers:
Frank B. Wilderson III is an award-winning writer whose books include Afropessimism, Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid, and Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. His literary awards include the American Book Award, the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award for Creative Nonfiction, the Maya Angelou Award for Best Fiction Portraying the Black Experience in America; and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. Wilderson was one of two Americans who held elected office in the ANC during the apartheid era. He is Chancellor’s Professor of African American Studies at UC Irvine.

Arthur Jafa is an artist, filmmaker, and cinematographer. Underscoring the many facets of Jafa’s practice is a recurring question: how can visual media transmit the equivalent “power, beauty and alienation” embedded within forms of Black music in US culture? Jafa has recent and forthcoming solo exhibitions of his work at the Pérez Art Museum Miami; the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives; Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and the Louisiana Museum of Art, Denmark. In 2019, he received the Golden Lion for the Best Participant of the 58th Venice Biennale “May You Live in Interesting Times.”

Saidiya Hartman is the author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, and Scenes of Subjection. A MacArthur Genius Fellow, she has been a Guggenheim Fellow, Cullman Fellow, and Fulbright Scholar. She has published articles in journals such as South Atlantic Quarterly, Brick, Small Axe, Callaloo, the New Yorker, and the Paris Review. She is a professor at Columbia University.

Patrice D. Douglass is an assistant professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. She holds a PhD and MA in Culture and Theory from the University of California, Irvine, a MA in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Riverside, and a BA in Feminist Studies and Legal Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
 

About the Mack Lecture Series
Since its inception, the Walker has hosted talks by artists, writers, and other great thinkers whose insights and ideas have informed our world. The Mack Lecture series explores our culture and contemporary moment through inspiring conversations and lectures aimed to deepen our understanding and appreciation of the great thought leaders of our time. This series will be hosted twice per academic semester.

Funding
The Mack Lecture series is made possible by generous support from Aaron and Carol Mack.