PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] – Juliet Hooker, a professor of political science at Brown University, will deliver a virtual Presidential Faculty Award lecture on Monday, Dec. 7. Her presentation, “Between Fact and Affect: Ida B. Wells and Harriet Jacobs on Black Loss,” will address the ways in which two Black woman thinkers made visible and grieved the losses suffered by Black communities in two different historical eras — and it will outline what lessons they might offer contemporary activists.
Hooker, whose research has drawn connections between racial justice movements throughout the Americas, has seen her work elevated into national and international spotlights this year in the wake of the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other Black Americans at the hands of white police officers. In her much-cited paper “Black Lives Matter and the Paradoxes of U.S. Black Politics,” published in the journal Political Theory in 2016, Hooker presciently argued that the widespread criticism that Black Lives Matter rallies were too violent or too radical were reminiscent of similar condemnations of civil rights marches in the Jim Crow era.
Hooker’s presentation on Dec. 7 will focus on Black grief, a concept she will explore as part of an upcoming book on political loss. Specifically, it will examine how Black activists and scholars characterize loss in their advocacy work.
“Activists often confront the question of how to represent losses in their work — not only how to mark them and present them, but also to call attention to them in order to compel other people to mobilize,” Hooker said. “When you make that move from grief to grievance, how do you do it? Do you represent these losses in a kind of unsentimental mode that’s focused on fact, or do you represent them in a personal, emotional way and focus on affect?”