Eric King Watts, UNC Chapel Hill, will be here at Wake on Thursday, February 23, 4pm, Annenberg Forum, Carswell Hall, WFU, followed by a reception.
He will discuss “You Mean You Don’t Want Me ‘Rene?”: Desire, Anxiety, and the Undecipherable Opening of Nella Larsen’s Passing"
Dr. Watts will explore the conditions of the emergence of Nella Larsen’s Passing. He will discuss how Passing disclosed the fragility of fantasies regarding New Negro racial identity and white supremacy. Passing deployed two inter-animating senses of “passing.” On the one hand, “passing” functioned as a way for some black folk to make new social worlds. In this sense, “passing” did not merely signify “racial” deception, it was a tactic made available by specific modes of visibility and audibility constitutive of New Negro aesthetic and artistic practices. On the other hand, “passing” named an affect. In the novel, “passing” is an intense performative act that undermines the law of racial and sexual order, showing identities to be held together by matrices of desire and anxiety. Mobility and undecidability collaborate to open spaces for the emergence of new forms of life, but these forms persistently register the potential for catastrophic failure of sense-making.
In his talk, Dr. Watts will investigate how Passing, as a work of art, is an opening, or, putting the matter more playfully, how the novel is “ajar.” And we shall also hear what passes out of Passing when we acknowledge the ethics and affects of Larsen’s speech. This occurrence of voice will not only allow us to better appreciate the production of this very important New Negro violation, but also to sense the peculiar stresses bearing down on some black female bodies as they were asked to be fetish and phantasms in service to social vitality and “racial advancement.”
Wake Forest University Department of Communication and the program in American Ethnic Studies invite students, scholars, community members, interest groups, and all those interested to a Symposium to discuss immigration, mobility, and citizenship. We will launch the ‘Where Are You From?’ Project and...
The American Ethnic Studies Program has embarked on a new project called "Where Are You From" along with the Documentary film studies program to record interviews with students from diverse ethnic backgrounds.
Please enjoy these videos also avalible on the youtube channel "Where Are You From"
Video From Mustafa Abdullah
Video From Cindy Reyburn
Video From Rui Zhang
Video From Michele Ferris
Video From Catherine Coelho
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Video From Jawad Wahabzada
Video From Muhammad Siddiqui
Video From Rhonda Chan Soo
Amid Rise of Multiculturalism, Dutch Confront Questions of Identity
