Event Type: 
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Reading List: 
Being and Insurrection by A. Shahid Stover, Being Apart by LaRose T. Parris, The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, Critique of Dialectical Reason by Jean-Paul Sartre,
Description/Abstract of your Event: 

Why are universal imperatives towards human liberation associated with Eurocentrism? What does Black liberation look like today? How do contemporary discursive orientations born in the particularity of lived Black experience speak to a universal imperative towards emancipatory praxis against Empire? How does the singularity of Black liberation mediate against false precepts of universality that imbue contemporary configurations of western imperialist power with sovereign legitimacy? And within this context of Black liberation, how should we understand the call for reparations and the emerging #ADOS movement? By interrogating Black subjectivity as an exceptional antagonism within a western imperialist continuum through engagements with the anti-slavery dialectic of Frederick Douglass, the existential Marxism of Jean-Paul Sartre, the decolonial phenomenology of Frantz Fanon, as well as contemporary theoretical tensions in the Academy between Africana thought and Afropessimism, this panel will explore the continued relevance of Black liberation towards rethinking the meaning, implication, and possibilities of Universality.


Robert D. Jackson is an independent scholar/historical and cultural critic who is a regular contributor to The Brotherwise Dispatch and has also written for The Indypendent.

A. Shahid Stover is an avant-garde African-American writer/philosopher and editor-in-chief of The Brotherwise Dispatch, a quarterly journal of radical theory, social critiques and emancipatory aesthetics. Stover is the author of Being and Insurrection (2019) and Hip Hop Intellectual Resistance...

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LaRose T. Parris is a professor of English at LaGuardia Community College/CUNY and author of Being Apart: Theoretical and Existential Resistance in Africana Literature, which was awarded the Nicolás Guillén Prize for Outstanding Book in Philosophical Literature by the Caribbean Philosophical...

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