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Professor Kris Sealey gives talk at Loyola

On January 27, 2023, Professor Kris Sealey, from the Fairfield University Philosophy Department, presented a talk on “Humanizing the Landscape from the Edge(s) of Empire.”  Her talked investigated South geographies in their capacity for articulating new calibrations of the entanglement between black freedom and black capture. Her analysis reads Southern black expressive cultures in the frame of Saidiya Hartman’s theory of Practice, arguing that they make possible a modality of the Afrofutural in their refusal of social death as the only horizon of possibility. With a focus on the steelpan in the Global South nation of Trinidad,  her talk traced the ways in which the instrument’s invention, its context of emergence and its enactment of something other than the totality of black capture all work to establish, in the present, a futural gesture of what it means for black living to overflow global systems of black death-making.