The Benjamin (Yale 1962) and Barbara Zucker Lecture Series
This talk will examine the place of fantasies of national purity in selected authoritarian states from Mussolini to the present, and how racial legislation and propaganda, such as that directed at Jews, factors into this larger context. We will look at the three timeframes and states of mind strongman leaders leverage: utopia, nostalgia, and crisis.
In the early eighteenth century, the Red Sea served as the maritime crossroads for a number of different commodities that captivated global consumers, such as Arabian coffee, eastern spices, Chinese porcelain, and Indian textiles. But, the Red Sea was not only a transit route, these items were also consumed and used in the port cities around the coasts of this body of water and their adjacent hinterlands.
At a moment of transnational racial reckoning, this listening session explores black frequency as a site of possibility. It engages black frequency in multiple forms: as a sonic space that ranges from silence to deafening, dissonant noise; as a register of ecstatic rapture and spirituality; as a temporal feedback loop of memory, repetition, and renewal; as a dynamic relation of call and response, or chorus and verse; as a haptic and kinetic space of contact and connection across the African continent and its various diasporas.
The Benjamin (Yale 1962) and Barbara Zucker Lecture Series
Terrence L. Johnson, Associate Professor of Religion and Politics, Georgetown University
The Benjamin (Yale 1962) and Barbara Zucker Lecture Series
Ethan Katz, Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies, University of California, Berkeley
