Friday, January 30 at 4:00 pm
UB Humanities Institute and Hallwalls present
A monthly lecture series featuring the UB Humanities Institute’s Faculty Fellows for the current academic year, hosted at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center.
4:00pm | Mingling
4:15pm | Introductions and featured talk followed by Q + A
We hope you'll join us in-person for the good camraderie and conversation, but you can also join the livestream via the Hallwalls website.
This talk will examine ethical-political interventions that engage in transgression and refusal as a means of exposing injustice. As Ralph Ellison observed, "For the art – the blues, the spirituals, the jazz, the dance — was what we had in place of freedom." Taking a cue from Ellison, my talk will explore how such Black Vernacular forms as the Blues, Jazz, and Muhammed Ali's famous rope-a-dope constitute political refusals. These practices when taken as alchemical acts of creation allow us to hear possibilities for understanding freedom and justice in a new register.
Havis is an Associate Professor in both the Department of Comparative Literature and the Global Gender and Sexuality Studies Department. She is keenly interested in how vernacular practices — especially those conjured within the context of Black ancestral discourses — may be understood as doing deep theoretical/philosophical work. During her UB Humanities Institute fellowship, Havis will be exploring how, despite numerous constraints, those often characterized as powerless have crafted ways to exercise power. She asserts that such 'practices of freedom under conditions of unfreedom,' may be chronicled through the creative and improvisational traditions that emerge from meaning structures cultivated by Black communities. Evident in the Spirituals, the Blues, Jazz, these modes of creation warrant being taken seriously as philosophy.