Please join the Race and Religion Constellation team for an online conversation Tuesday 22 September on Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World authored by Zakiyyah Iman Jackson. Jackson is a black feminist scholar and assistant professor in English at the University of Southern California, USA. In Becoming Human, she grapples with the enduring relationship between animality and blackness in Western science and philosophy. Studying African diasporic literary and visual culture and straddling the disciplines of philosophy, art and science, Jackson develops a new understanding of black ontology that both critiques and displaces the racializing and animalizing logics underpinning Western thought.
In this session, we will discuss the book and any kind of question it stirs up within us. What kind of conceptual implications can we discern from thinking blackness from the perspective of animalization for theorizing the race-religion constellation? How do we envision the political implications Jackson’s theory has for doing anti-racist work? How, if at all, does the book resonate with our own individual scholarly, artistic or activist terrains of interest? These and more, or other, questions can be posed during the session. It will be an open forum for collective exploration and exchange.
We encourage you to get a copy of the book and read it, but if you are pressed for time consider to check out the interviews with Jackson on podcasts such as Parallax View and Always Already Podcast, or watch a recording of the online book launch on YouTube.
Please confirm your participation with Mariska Jung via [email protected].