This afternoon-long symposium brings together scholars to discuss how visual cultures of blackness constitute and are mediated by science, social science, and technology. Rather than read aesthetics as a reprieve from technoscience, we ask how these various domains enmesh at the site of Black flesh. The invited speakers reckon with how the aesthetic arrangement of Blackened corporeality across these domains has long been and remains a critical apparatus to cohere broader definitions of heaven/hell, nature/culture, hero/criminal, human/machine, and life/death. 

Cecilio M. Cooper (Science History Institute) will present on how early modern alchemy remains an under-examined set of traditions through which blackness visually manifests as a sexuated and desecrated phenomenon. Henry Washington, Jr. (UC Berkeley) reads Pauline Hopkins’ 1900 short story “Talma Gordon”, the first mystery narrative by an African American writer, as exemplary of the promise and peril in post-Reconstruction era black visual practice. Shelleen Greene (UCLA) will give the keynote lecture that explores the overlap between the racial and digital “uncanny valley” in the posthumous performances and afterlives of Michael Jackson, particularly through his “holographic” appearance at the 2014 Billboard Music Awards. 

Speaker Bios 

Cecilio M. Cooper is a Fellow in Residence with the Science History Institute’s Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry after completing a Price-Haas Postdoctoral Fellowship there and a Long-Term Fellowship with the Folger Shakespeare Library. 

Henry Washington, Jr. is an assistant professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also the founder and convener of the Black Critical Theory Initiative. 

Shelleen Greene is an associate professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the Department of Film, Television and Digital Media at the University of California, Los Angeles. She was the 2020-21 Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the University of Leeds. Her research interests include Italian cinema, Black European studies, and Black Digital Studies.

Sponsorship 

The symposium is presented by USC’s Consortium for Gender, Sexuality, Race and Public Culture and Black Visual Cultures Collective (BVCC), which is co-founded by Naima Adams (American Studies), Corrine Collins (English), and Mlondolozi Zondi (Comparative Literature).

This event is made possible with generous support from the Mellon Foundation, as well as cosponsorship from the Black Studies Center, Center for Feminist Research, Center for Science, Technology, and Public Life, Department of Comparative Literature, Division of Cinema and Media Studies, Levan Institute for the Humanities, Media as Sociotechnical Systems, Sidney Harman Academy for Polymathic Study, and USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute.