First Annual Modern Culture and Media Distinguished Lecture: Denise Ferreira da Silva

The Department of Modern Culture and Media
, 305

Please join us for the First Annual Modern Culture and Media Distinguished Lecture with Denise Ferreira da Silva.

4PM Screening | Elemental Cinema:

Serpent Rain (2016)

4Waters/Deep Implicancy (2018)

Soot Breath/Corpus Infinitum (2020)

6PM Lecture

Reception to follow. 

Please register using the link below.

A Story of Us: Attention, Reflection, and Extraction in Tales of the End(s) of the Human

In this talk, Professor Denise Ferreira da Silva experiments with an account of the ethical and aesthetical dimensions of an electronically mediated existence, which seems fully permeated by and thoroughly configured through the apparatus that enable global capital to profit from the extraction of attention. In this reading of episodes of the acclaimed British series Black Mirror, Professor Ferreira da Silva will comment on how, in this global moment, raciality facilitates capital accumulation both economically and ethically, working through the figures of humanity and subjectivity as these play in the series’ dystopian tales. More specifically, although the tales themselves are the focus of the reading, the main move in this exercise is to activate blackness’s capacity to unravel the modern ethical grammar in order to enable the drawing of a transversal line across the various parts that constitutes the apparatus of extraction of affect that seems to prevail in today’s global existence, thereby exposing how coloniality (juridical) and raciality govern the global present.

An academic, artist and filmmaker, Dr. Denise Ferreira da Silva’s work addresses the ethico-political challenges of the global present. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), A Dívida Impagavel (OIP and Living Commons, 2019), Unpayable Debt (Stenberg 2022), Homo Modernus (Cobogó, 2022), and co-editor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).

Note: Doors open at 3:30 pm. Please arrive before 3:50 pm to claim your seat. Any reserved seats not claimed by 3:50 pm will be released to the public on a first-come, first-served basis.