Friday, October 2, 2026
10:00 AM - 6:30 PM
A.D. White House
Meals & Reception Provided
Black critical thought reconfigures the inherited categories and lexicons through which the world is made knowable. From psychoanalysis to aesthetic theory, political theology to science, Black critical thought confronts us endlessly with the question of how disciplinary—as well as non-disciplinary—knowledge is created and reproduced, what it enables and makes inevitable, what it represses and makes impossible. Amid ongoing social and political upheaval, both our insulated and protected, or destabilized and unraveling frameworks call for renewed attention: how do we interpret the structures— psychic, social, political, historical, philosophical— that shape knowledge and experience?
This one-day symposium will feature panel presentations from students and faculty across several disciplines and departments at Cornell and will conclude with a keynote conversation with Fred Moten. The symposium participants will consider how Black critical thought reconfigures central terms in the humanities and social sciences: the subject, consciousness, embodiment, form, violence, critique, the concept of the world itself. While particularly attuned to engagements with racial slavery, colonialism, capitalism, and gender and sexuality, we do not treat Black Studies as a bounded field or a discrete set of topics. Rather, the event asks how Black critical thought challenges or reshapes our theoretical vocabularies, how it reorients our relationship to thinking, to the human, to life and to death.
The event is being supported by History of Art and Comparative Literature. Co-sponsors are the departments of Performing and Media Arts, Africana, Government, and Literatures in English as well as the American Studies Program. The Institute for Comparative Modernities, and Society for the Humanities, American Studies.
Symposium Schedule
10:00 – Coffee and Breakfast
10:30–12:15 – Introduction & Panel 1: Black Feminism &
Aesthetics
Chelsea Mikael Frazier, PhD (Literatures in English)
"Black Feminist Ecology"
Breigh Plat (Performing and Media Arts)
"The Real Reel: The Objet Petit A and "Internet Addiction" in Qualeasha Wood’s
It’s All For U (If U Rlly Want It)"
Kimiyo Bremer (History of Art and Visual Studies)
"Black Feminist Vision Boarding: Anti-Printmaking and Installation in Black
Women’s Contemporary Art"
Taylor A. Morgan (Africana Studies)
"Behold, the Coagula!: Citizen Science and Racial Diagnostics in Get Out (2017)"
Respondent Riché Richardson, PhD (Africana Studies)
12:15–1:15 PM – Lunch
1:15–2:30 – Panel 2: Black Music & Abstraction
Victoria Netanus Xaka, PhD (Music)
"More Life"
Pat LeGates (Comparative Literature)
"Articulating Abstraction from Marx to Spillers: Notes on Real Abstraction,
University Grounds, and The Propaganda of History"
Grant Farred, PhD (Africana Studies)
"Triple Consciousness"
Respondent Fred Moten, PhD (NYU, Performance Studies and
Comparative Literature)
2:45–4:00 – Panel 3: Race, Religion, Reparations
Xavier Pickett, PhD (Africana Studies)
"Why We Can’t Give Up on Thinking about Normativity in the Study of Black
Religion, or Why Manning Marable Retrieves Blackwater"
Sophia Jahadhmy (Africana Studies)
"Disrupting the African/Arab Racial Binary in East Africa"
Joceyln Poe, PhD (City and Regional Planning)
"Wakati Wetu: A Case for Public Space, Reparations and Fugitive Planning"
Respondent Jehan L. Roberson (Literatures in English)
4:15–5:00 – Keynote Conversation with Fred Moten
5:00–6:30 – Reception
For more information contact: Patricia Ekpo (pe79@cornell.edu) and Parisa Vaziri (pv248@cornell.edu).
