*These events will be held in-person and are open to current NYU students, faculty, and staff only. Attendees must RSVP for the locations.*
On Thursday & Friday, November 18-19th at 5 PM EST, Jay Garcia and the Department of Comparative Literature will host Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiesis in Black, a book launch panel and lecture with R.A. Judy, Jay Garcia, Emanuela Bianchi, and Fred Moten!
Thursday, November 18th:
Jay Garcia, Emanuela Bianchi, Fred Moten in conversation with R.A. Judy about Sentient Flesh - RSVP HERE
Friday, November 19th:
"The Idea of Reading for Para-semiosis and Poetic Socialities" - Keynote Lecture by R.A. Judy - RSVP HERE
About the Book
In Sentient Flesh, R. A. Judy takes up freedman Tom Windham’s 1937 remark “we should have our liberty 'cause . . . us is human flesh" as a point of departure for an extended meditation on questions of the human, epistemology, and the historical ways in which the black being is understood. Drawing on numerous fields, from literary theory and musicology, to political theory and phenomenology, as well as Greek and Arabic philosophy, Judy engages literary texts and performative practices such as music and dance that express knowledge and conceptions of humanity appositional to those grounding modern racialized capitalism. Operating as critiques of Western humanism, these practices and modes of being-in-the-world—which he theorizes as “thinking in disorder,” or “poiēsis in black”—foreground the irreducible concomitance of flesh, thinking, and personhood. As Judy demonstrates, recognizing this concomitance is central to finding a way past the destructive force of ontology that still holds us in thrall. Erudite and capacious, Sentient Flesh offers a major intervention in the black study of life.
R. A. Judy is Professor of Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh and author of (Dis)forming the American Canon: African-Arabic Slave Narratives and the Vernacular.