Tiffany E. Barber: Undesirability and Her Sisters - Lecture
The Department of Africana Studies introduces an ongoing series, Black Studies Book Club. Each semester, BSBC brings a scholar whose recent publication has shifted the conversation in Africana Studies to campus to give a public lecture and discuss their recent work (free and open to everyone). Our next Black Studies Book Club Scholar is Tiffany E. Barber, who will be speaking about their book Undesirability and Her Sisters on Thursday, February 19th at Tulane University.
ABOUT UNDESIRABILITY AND HER SISTERS
How Black women’s visual work functions in an era of new racial and gender meaning
In the wake of contemporary art’s post-Black turn and the mainstreaming of intersectionality, Undesirability and Her Sisters charts a new genealogy of Black women’s art that exposes the unfinished project of racial and gender empowerment in the twenty-first century. Tiffany Barber argues that Black women’s social positions at the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and class are inherently queer, thus spurring unexpected aesthetic strategies that throw into high relief the ethical terrain of what it means to be Black and a woman now.
Undesirability and Her Sisters collates what Barber terms “undesirable” representations of Black female bodies in recent American sculpture, collage, photography, and dance-based performance art by Kara Walker, Wangechi Mutu, Xaviera Simmons, and Narcissister. These works not only engage the visual senses but also incorporate olfactory, haptic, and sonic experiences that challenge traditional interpretations of Blackness and womanhood in art history, Black Studies, feminist and gender studies, dance and performance studies, and queer studies. Instead of transcendental beauty, wholeness, and individual and collective becoming, the perverse Black female figures profiled here eschew sublimation and synthesis as necessary responses to racial and gender subjugation in the past, present, and future.
Through its unique, groundbreaking analysis, this book contributes to the ongoing discussions on the ethics of representation—the capacity to speak and act for oneself, to have significance and impact, and ultimately, to reject acknowledgment.
More about Undesirability and Her Sisters
Please contact Andres Gonzalez at Agonzalez1@tulane.edu at least two weeks in advance of the event if you have accessibility needs and need a disability-related accommodation to participate.
