RFG Talk: Thinking with the Sound of Catastrophe

When death is ubiquitous and violence structural and gratuitous, catastrophe has a sound. How do our racialized lives allow for or shield us from familiarity to this sound? The conditions of colonial violence, imperialism, and global capitalism construct African Black bodies into a kind of listening bodies. But what kind of listening bodies are these? In this talk, Brenda Umutoniwase will explore the listening body from Rwanda to South Africa as a site of conflations: as subject to the mechanics of colonial violence but also the very site from which it counters this violence.

Brenda Umutoniwase is a doctoral student in the Department of African American Studies at Emory University. Her research focuses on formulations of racialized Blackness beyond the Middle passage epistemologies, particularly looking at temporal/geographic spaces in Africa.

Zoom attendance link here

Sponsored by the IHC’s Environmental and Postcolonial Media Theories Research Focus Group