Deadline extended to April 5th!

Across the humanities, as well as the social and biological sciences, there is growing recognition that the concept of “the human” is neither empirically fixed nor transcendentally universal. Rather, it is a rhetorical artifice—an attempt to answer questions about who we are and why we exist. Moreover, critical theorists in Black Studies have examined not only how Black people have not been recognized as human under white supremacy, but also how gestures of inclusion into humanity have failed to put an end to the gratuitous violence enacted against them. This has led scholar Zakiyyah Iman Jackson to ask: “If being recognized as human offers no reprieve from ontologizing dominance and violence, then what might we gain from the rupture of the human?” 

This Graduate Colloquium invites graduate students to share work-in-progress that interrogates the human’s connotative, denotative, and empirical baggage as well as dares to invent, refine, and imagine new concepts and practices in the human’s wake.

The workshop will be held virtually on August 5th and 6th, 2021. To apply, please submit by April 5th, via this Google Form, a brief description of the work you intend to workshop at the Colloquium. We will notify successful applicants by May 1st. Participants in the workshop will be expected to share their work-in-progress (10-25 pages) by June 25th, to give the other participants time to read and engage it before the Colloquium. Professor Alexander G. Weheliye will join us for a keynote session. We invite participants to share work at any stage.