Spector Lecture 2025: Professor Phanuel Antwi
"翱苍听叠别颈苍驳听Cuddled; Or, Bearing the听Racial Embrace"
The Department of English is thrilled to announce the 2025 Spector Lecturer: Phanuel Antwi, Canada Research Chair in Black Arts and Epistemologies and Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia.
Professor Antwi's talk, "On Being Cuddled; Or, Bearing the Racial Embrace", stems from the research leading to his latest book On Cuddling: Loved to Death in the Racial Embrace. Ranging from the terrifying embrace of the slave ship's hold to the racist encoding of 'cuddly' toys, On Cuddling is a unique combination of essay and poetry that contends with the way racial violence is enacted through intimacy.
Informed by Black feminist and queer poetics, Phanuel Antwi focuses his lens on the suffering of Black people at the hands of state violence and racial capitalism. As radical movements grow to advance Black liberation, so too must our ways of understanding how racial capitalism embraces us all. Antwi turns to cuddling, an act we imagine as devoid of violence, and explores it as a tense transfer point of power.
Through archival documents and multiple genres of writing, the book demonstrates clearly that the racial violence of the state and economy has always been about the (mis)management of intimacies, which we should face with resistance and solidarity.
WHEN: February 18, 2025, 6 - 8 PM
WHERE: Arts W-120, 9I制作厂免费, 853 Sherbrooke W.
Phanuel Antwi holds the and is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia. He writes, researches, and teaches critical black studies; settler colonial studies; black Atlantic and diaspora studies; Canadian literature and culture since 1830; critical race, gender, and sexuality studies; and material cultures. He is also an artist, curator, and activist, working with text, dance, film and photography to intervene in artistic, academic and public spaces. He has published articles in Interventions, Affinities, and Studies in Canadian Literature, and he is completing a book-length project titled 鈥淐urrencies of Blackness: Faithfulness, Cheerfulness and Politeness in Settler Writing.鈥�
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