J. LORAND MATORY
Lawrence Richardson Distinguished Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University

The Enlightenment’s promises of freedom, equality before the law, and bodily autonomy have generated a sometimes-unconscious craving for the opposite. BDSM shines a light on the nostalgia for anachronistic and physically enforced hierarchy in modern romance, religion, and politics. This talk focuses on parallel but ethically divergent examples of this impulse in three products of the post-Enlightenment state—BDSM, Haitian Vodou, and Trumpism.

J. Lorand Matory is the Lawrence Richardson Distinguished Professor of Cultural Anthropology and the Director of the Sacred Arts of the Black Atlantic Project at Duke University. He is the author of Sex and the Empire That Is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion, Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé, Stigma and Culture: Last-Place Anxiety in Black America, and The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make.

Open to all interested participants.

Co-sponsored by the USC Dornsife Department of Anthropology