About this Event
Join us on Thursday, October 1st at 6pm as we host Prof. Ainsley LeSure in conversation with Prof. Tricia Rose to discuss her new book, Locating Racism in the World! Signed copies of the book will be available for purchase.
About the book:
In Locating Racism in the World, Ainsley LeSure develops a worldly theory of antiblack racism rooted in the analytic promise of phenomenology, a philosophical examination of lived experience, to help explain why and how American democracy is confronting its greatest existential threat since the Civil War on the eve of its 250th anniversary. She argues that racism is best understood as a reality-violating common sense generated and perfected through racist practices that produce a white, antiblack world. This worldly theory of antiblack racism is developed over the course of four chapters that explore how five central texts in political theory and black studies - Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton's Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967), Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Hannah Arendt's infamous essay, “Reflections on Little Rock” (1957/1959), Saidiya Hartman's Scenes of Subjection and Hortense Spiller's “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book” - theorize the dilemma of antiblack racism. This worldly understanding avoids the key pitfall of post-Civil Rights theories of racism: the assumption that one needs to account for the emotional and mental states of individuals to validate beyond dispute that certain racial practices and their outcomes are instances of racism. And it also avoids Black studies' recent pessimism by clarifying that the aim of a democratic politics strong enough to combat racial common sense is to make the world appear, that is normatively bound citizens to substantiality of reality, by bolstering plurality and making equality an inspiring source of action in our everyday lives.
About the author:
Ainsley LeSure is the Richard and Edna Salomon Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Brown University. She specializes in political theory, with a particular focus on the critical theory of race and racism, phenomenology, democratic theory, and feminist theory.
About the moderator:
Tricia Rose studies African American life, culture, and the impact of inequality, in the post-civil rights era. Rose’s work is especially interested in the ways that contemporary forms of systemic racism are blurred and hidden in our everyday storytelling about racism as well as the important role African-American expressive culture plays in creating spaces of recognition, resilience, and resistance. She is the author of four books and one edited collection on subjects ranging from her most recent work on systemic racism to her earlier award-winning work on hip hop, black women’s sexuality, and black popular culture.
Event venue & nearby stays
Symposium Books, 240 Westminster Street, Providence, United States
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