People-of-Color-Blindness: A Lecture by Jared Sexton

Jared Sexton, Associate Professor and Director of the Program in African American Studies at UC Irvine, will discuss the concept of "people of color," highlighting a form of blindness to the singularity of racial slavery internal to its articulation. The first section of the talk charts briefly a theoretical itinerary that reads the radical black feminism of Saidiya Hartman and Hortense Spillers and the political ontology of Frank B. Wilderson against the prevarication regarding slavery and its afterlife in prominent strains of critical theory. The second section attempts to situate Wilderson's formulation of "afro-pessimism" with respect to the "black optimism" articulated by Fred Moten and other theorists of black performance.