On Tuesday, November 8th at 6 PM, Mariano López Seoane and the Department of Comparative Literature will host the first installment of the Fall 2022 series Subjugated Knowledges and Situated Experiences in Our Global Institutions - Price of Entry I: Theory in Debt, a conversation between Marquis Bey and Joseph M. Pierce!
This in-person event is open to the public - advanced registration and proof of compliance with NYU's vaccination policy is required for non-NYU visitors. Instructions for accessing campus will be sent to you upon registration: RSVP HERE
It is increasingly clear that the experiences and knowledges of vulnerable communities and peripheral cultures can be a source of value for global institutions. Museums, universities, film festivals and publishing houses in New York, London, Paris and Berlin routinely program shows and events, and include films and writers that stand in representation of an entire marginalized national or subcultural collective. In words that resonate with our own critical glossaries, the inclusion of native informants of different sorts has become de rigueur in any institution or event that aspires to be current, relevant and unproblematically “critical”. Rather than questioning this state of affairs as mere trend, this series of panels would like to explore the effects this problematic inclusion has on the subjects and cultures invited to join the global conversation. As more and more cultural agents, artists and intellectuals that act “in representation” enjoy the benefits of this metropolitan curiosity, this series of conversations would like to explore modes of negotiation, cunning strategies, possible qualms and even regrets. What is the price of entry to global institutions? What experiences and knowledges can be exchanged for this inclusion?
In this conversation, Indigenous and queer scholar Joseph M. Pierce and Black Trans-feminist scholar and activist Marquis Bey will elaborate on their work with the types of knowledge produced in socially engaged academic fields, specifically regarding its relationship, and its debts, with local (sub)cultures. In Trans Studies, Queer Theory and Critical Race Theory, to name a few, the meaningful connection with communities and traditions has informed, and supported, the movement of thought. We would like to examine, then, what is sacrificed when embodied experiences and collective knowledges are “elevated” to academic theory.
Marquis Bey's (they/them, or any pronoun) work focuses on blackness and fugitivity, transness, and black feminist theory. Bey is particularly concerned with modes of subjectivity that index otherwise ways of being, utilizing blackness and transness—as fugitive, extra-ontological postures—as names for such otherwise subjectivities. These two analytics (rather than endowments of the epidermis or specific bodily morphologies) are the axes around which Bey thinks about subjectivity formation and deformation, abolition, and political work. Bey's recently published book, Black Trans Feminism (Duke University Press) attempts to theorize the convergence of blackness, transness, and black feminism via the Black Radical Tradition, critical theory, and contemporary literature.
Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation citizen) is Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University. His research focuses on the intersections of kinship, gender, sexuality, and race in Latin America, 19th century literature and culture, queer studies, Indigenous studies, and hemispheric approaches to citizenship and belonging. He is the author of Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890-1910 (SUNY Press, 2019) and co-editor of Políticas del amor: Derechos sexuales y escrituras disidentes en el Cono Sur (Cuarto Propio, 2018) as well as the 2021 special issue of GLQ, “Queer/Cuir Américas: Translation, Decoloniality, and the Incommensurable.” His work has been published in Revista Hispánica Moderna, Critical Ethnic Studies, and Latin American Research Review. Along with SJ Norman (Koori of Wiradjuri descent) he is co-curator of the performance series Knowledge of Wounds.
This event is co-sponsored by the Comparatorium.
