TOMORROW, Wednesday, April 26: RL Watson presents “Darkness as Moral Aesthetic: Failing Attempts at Empathy”

Dear friends,
Please join us for our next workshop!Wednesday, April 26th
4:45 – 6 pm
Swift room 201

RL Watson presents “Darkness as Moral Aesthetic: Failing Attempts at Empathy.”

Abstract: To be in “darkness” is to be morally in the wrong, defunct, and ignorant, and these understandings of this family of words are supported and generated again and again with startling reliability by our society and its antecedents. It is increasingly in poor taste to make explicit use of darker-skinned human bodies to represent these negative attributes, and, accordingly, darkness has been increasingly relegated to its role as a conceptual descriptor, disassociated from essentializations of the skin as marker of moral (dis)ability. However, the presumed separation between the use of darkness as a symbol of badness, and the use of darkness as an aesthetic descriptor is a false one, not borne out by representations of darkness, depravity, the demonic, and darker bodies. Moreover, belief in the possibility of this semantic separation allows for discrimination, separation, invisibility, and death to take hold unabated, as our perception of dark bodies invokes a miasma of violence, fear, rejection, disgust, and any number of responses deemed only natural when one responds to moral darkness, unassociated with any particular body. (E.g., Darren Wilson’s infamous description of Michael Brown: “It looked like a demon.”)

Questions for discussion: What options may there be for combating the effects of our semantic inheritance? Is it possible to defund our aesthetic descriptors of their attendant moral meanings? Is recognition of the attending liabilities in our use of aesthetic language to describe or imply moral conditions sufficient to combat the disproportionately felt ill effects of these frameworks?

The event is free. Food and drinks will be provided. All are welcome!

Hope to see you there!

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