4:30 pm
Clark Hall Room 206
This talk will examine ethical-political interventions that engage in transgression and refusal as a means of exposing injustice. As Ralph Ellison observed, “For the art – the blues, the spirituals, the jazz, the dance – was what we had in place of freedom.” Taking a cue from Ellison, my talk will explore how such Black Vernacular forms as the Blues, Jazz, and Muhammed Ali’s famous rope-a-dope constitute political refusals. These practices when taken as alchemical acts of creation allow us to hear possibilities for understanding freedom and justice in a new register.
The talk is part of a larger book project that explores how those often characterized as powerless have crafted ways to exercise power. Asserting that such deployments are ‘practices of freedom under conditions of unfreedom,’ Havis draws upon Black vernacular traditions and such thinkers as Michel Foucault, Charles Mills, and Saidiya Hartman to understand how these creative and improvisational practices warrant being taken seriously as philosophy.
About the speaker:
Dr. Devonya Havis, Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at State University of New York-Buffalo, holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Boston College and is the author of Creating a Black Vernacular Philosophy (Lexington Books, 2023) as well as numerous journal articles and contributed chapters to edited collections on topics related to the work of Foucault, Black philosophy, sexuality, and jazz as a philosophical idiom. In addition, she is a community activist and podcaster (contributing to HotelBarPodcast.com).