The Studio Museum in Harlem and 754 Schermerhorn Ext.
LOOK! : a graduate student workshop, presented by the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender
Frantz Fanon’s seminal essay “The Lived Experience of the Black Man” begins with an imperative: “Look!” This command cascades through the essay, exploding Fanon’s prose as both a mode of violence and a demand for recognition. Pinned by the white child’s look, Fanon is transformed into an “object among other objects” and denied the reciprocal recognition that might otherwise establish him as a subject. In turn, he converts himself into an object of knowledge, inhabiting the very terms by which he was seen: “Since the Other was reluctant to recognize me, there was only one answer: to make myself known.” This tension between looking and knowing strikes at the heart of a Western philosophical tradition that has long conflated visibility with truth — and it is here that Fanon’s essay becomes a critical site through which we might better apprehend the sedimented aesthetic logics that underwrite our contemporary order.
In this graduate student workshop, we take up the politics and ethics of looking, with particular attention to the aesthetic, historical, and racial grammars that shape visual perception. What are the effects of looking and being looked at? What forms of power—racial, sexual, gendered, colonial—are implicit in the event when one is hailed to look or hailed by a look? How does looking differ from seeing, gazing, or staring? How might we understand a look as distinct from the gaze? What are the historical and epistemic conditions under which looking is possible, prohibited, or compelled? And what forms of refusal, opacity, or self-fashioning emerge when the objects of perception look back?
This workshop aims to bring together participants across fields spanning (but not limited to) literary studies, Black studies, art history, film & media studies, cultural theory, studies in gender & sexuality, theater and performance studies, disability studies, and aesthetic philosophy. We are especially interested in work that engages:
- the shifting grammars of looking across aesthetic, archival, or historical contexts;
- the visuality of race, gender, and sexuality;
- practices of witnessing, spectatorship, and surveillance;
- opacity, refusal, and practices of looking away;
- looking as interpellation, address, or demand;
- the relationship between surface, style, and embodied perception;
- the ethics and politics of being rendered visible or invisible.
Conference Schedule
Friday, April 17th
- 2:00–4:00pm. Guided Tour of the Studio Museum
- 4:30–6pm. Keynote address by Rachel Grace Newman
Saturday, April 18th
- 9:30am. Coffee and pastries available
- 10–11:15am. In Living Color: On Blackness, Form, and Poetics with Jay Gao (Columbia), Sofia Smith (Brown), and Desiree McCary (Pittsburgh Theological Seminary)
- 11:30–12:45pm. Sensational Film: On Cinema, Perception, and Aesthetic Vulnerability with Madelyn Neal (NYU), Amira Olinguo (Brown), and Amy Poncher (University of Southern California)
- 1–2:15pm. Lunch, which will be provided for registered attendees
- 2:30–3:45pm. The “Right to Look”: Ethnography, Surveillance, and Policing with Frances Cathryn (Columbia), Hayoung Lee (Columbia), and Pat Torres (Columbia)
- 4–5:15pm. Meaningful Moves: On Gesture, Exchange, and Transnational Performance with Daria Sadova (NYU), Lauren Stockmon Brown (Columbia), Isabella Pereira Nikel (Columbia)
