Tina Campt: Prelude to a New Black Gaze

Please join the From Slavery to Freedom Lab for Dr. Tina Campt's lecture. Coffee and light breakfast available at 9:00am; lecture begins at 9:30am.

What is a "black gaze"? The term is an both invitation and a provocation to reflect on our current moment of diasporic countervisuality. It is a paradoxical moment forged "in the wake" (Sharpe, 2017) of the afterlife of slavery - a moment when we are inundated by images of precarious black life and antiblack violence, while simultaneously witnessing an ascendance of black aesthetics in the fine arts and in popular culture. This paradox provides the foundation for the emergence of a black gaze. Focusing on the critical and creative ways black artists are repurposing the amateur visual archive of the black experience, the talk explores the new visual modalities they are creating to render and the radical possibilities they present for imagining different kinds of black futurity.

Dr. Tina Campt is Claire Tow and Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Africana and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College-Columbia University. She is the author of three books: Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (2004), Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe (2012), and Listening to Images (2017). She is a black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art, and is completing a new collection of essays entitled, The New Black Gaze.