Tag Archives: Saidiya Hartman

CLAUDIA RANKINE AND JUDITH BUTLER IN CONVERSATION

On my way to retrieve my coat I’m paused in the hallway in someone else’s home when a man approaches to tell me he thinks his greatest privilege is his height. There’s a politics around who is tallest, and right now he’s passively blocking passage, so yes. But greatest, no. Predictably, I say, I think your whiteness is your greatest privilege. To this, he pivots and reports that, unlike other whites who have confessed to him they are scared of Blacks, he is comfortable around Black people because he played basketball. He doesn’t say with Black men because that’s implied. For no good reason, except perhaps inside the inane logic of if you like something so much, you might as well marry it, I ask him, are you married to a Black woman? What? He says, no, she’s Jewish. After a pause, he adds, she’s white. I don’t ask him about his closest friends, his colleagues, his neighbors, his wife’s friends, his institutions, our institutions, structural racism, unconscious bias — I just decide, since nothing keeps happening, no new social interaction, no new utterances from me or him, both of us in default fantasies, I just decide to stop tilting my head to look up.

I have again reached the end of waiting. What is it the theorist Saidiya Hartman said? “Educating white people about racism has failed.” Or, was it that “hallways are liminal zones where we shouldn’t fail to see what’s possible.” Either way, and still, all the way home, the tall man’s image stands before me, ineluctable. And then the Hartman quote I was searching for arrives: “One of the things I think is true, which is a way of thinking about the afterlife of slavery in regard to how we inhabit historical time, is the sense of temporal entanglement, where the past, the present and the future, are not discrete and cut off from one another, but rather that we live the simultaneity of that entanglement. This is almost common sense to Black folk. How does one narrate that?” Her question is the hoop that encircles. Claudia Rankine, from Just Us: An American Conversation*

This week join Rankine and Judith Butler—author of The Force of Nonviolence—in conversation.

This online event is presented by the New Museum’s Stuart Regen Visionaries Series program. See link below for details.

CLAUDIA RANKINE and JUDITH BUTLER IN CONVERSATION

New Museum

Thursday, October 29.

4 pm on the West Coast; 7 pm East Coast.

*Claudia Rankine, Just Us: An American Conversation (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2020). © Claudia Rankine.

From top: Claudia Rankine, photograph courtesy of Blue Flower Arts; Claudia Rankine, Just Us: An American Conversation (2020) cover image courtesy and © Graywolf Press; Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence (2020) cover image courtesy and © Verso; Judith Butler, courtesy of the photographer and the author.

SAIDIYA HARTMAN AND ARTHUR JAFA

Join Saidiya Hartman—author of the new book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments—and Arthur Jafa at the Hammer for a public conversation about their work.

Jafa’s new exhibition at Moderna Museet in Stockholm opens later this month.

SAIDIYA HARTMAN and ARTHUR JAFA in conversation

Thursday, June 6, at 7:30 pm.

Hammer Museum

10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles.

From top: Saidiya Hartman, courtesy of the author and Columbia University; Arthur Jafa, Apex, 2018, Luma, Arles, installation views (2); Arthur Jafa, courtesy of the artist.

SIMONE LEIGH AND SAIDIYA HARTMAN IN CONVERSATION

Join Simone Leigh and Saidiya Hartman—author of the acclaimed new study Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval—for a Frieze Talk this week in New York.

“[Hartman’s] work has always examined the great erasures and silences—the lost and suppressed stories of the Middle Passage, of slavery and its long reverberations. Her rigor and restraint give her writing its distinctive electricity and tension. Hartman is a sleuth of the archive.” — Parul Sehgal

SIMONE LEIGH and SAIDIYA HARTMAN in conversation

FRIEZE NEW YORK

Friday, May 3, at noon.

Randall’s Island Park, New York City.

SIMONE LEIGH—LOOPHOLE OF RETREAT

Through October 27.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

1071 Fifth Avenue (at 88th Street), New York City.

From top: Saidiya Hartman (left) and Simone Leigh, courtesy of the author and artist; Leigh with Brick House—her High Line Plinth work—in process, photograph by Timothy Schenck, courtesy of the artist and the photographer; Hartman book cover courtesy W.W. Norton & Company.

LOOPHOLE OF RETREAT

Okwui Okpokwasili, Françoise Vergès, Lorraine O’Grady, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, and Dionne Brand are among the many artists, authors, and educators who will be at the Guggenheim this weekend for the LOOPHOLE OF RETREAT conference.

This “daylong gathering dedicated to the intellectual life of black women” was organized by Simone Leigh, Tina Campt, and Saidiya Hartman, author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments.

LOOPHOLE OF RETREAT—A CONFERENCE

Saturday, April 27, from 1 pm.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

1071 Fifth Avenue (at 88th Street), New York City.

The name of the conference—and Leigh’s concurrent show at the museum—refers to a chapter title in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs, who referred to the opening line of the poem “The Task” (1784) by William Cowper.

From top: Okwui Okpokwasili (left), Poor People’s TV Room, 2017, courtesy of the artist; Lorraine O’Grady, Art Is. . . (Girl Pointing), 1983/2009, chromogenic color print, courtesy of the artist and Alexander Gray Associates, New York, © 2015 Lorraine O’Grady, Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York); Simone Leigh with a wax mold of a braid for the High Line Plinth piece Brick House, at Stratton Sculpture Studios in Philadelphia, photograph by Constance Mensh. Brick House will be on view in Manhattan from June 2019.

JAMES CROSBY AT TEAM BUNGALOW

“In FORMS BETWEEN, James Crosby confronts a long-established history, in art and elsewhere, of black and brown bodies bearing the sole burden of race and race-related subject matter. Instead, Crosby’s work explores how race and racial meaning-making happen between us, not in or on any given set of people or bodies.

“Racial meanings form between bodies and between people, and they form not only in moments of hyper-publicized black death, but also in the most mundane moments, gestures, and histories. Like Saidiya Hartman’s resolution to ‘… consider those scenes where terror can barely be discerned,’ Crosby’s work explores the everyday materialities of structural violence and personal possibility.”*

 

JAMES CROSBY—FORMS BETWEEN, through April 15.

TEAM BUNGALOW, 306 Windward Avenue, Venice Beach, Los Angeles.

teamgal.com/james_crosby

Artwork by James Crosby. Courtesy of the artist and Team Gallery.

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