Please join us for a lecture by Nicholas Mirzoeff called “The World of Statues: Mobility, Whiteness and the Infrastructures of Race.”
In this presentation, Mirzoeff will consider what Frantz Fanon called the colonial “world of statues.” By this he meant both the widespread physical presence of colonial statues and museums, and the colonial refusal to allow mobility. These statues and their preservation of immobility form the infrastructures of “race” in material form. The dispossessed claim mobility and deploy their capacity. To sustain these claims, new infrastructures are required—first of services, and then of what Mirzoeff calls “appearance,” the right to appear and be seen as a fully human person.
There will be a light reception at the Center for 21st Century Studies (Curtin 939) following the event.
*Join us also in the C21 office (Curtin 939) at noon on Friday for a special brown bag discussion with Mirzoeff.
About the Speaker:
Nicholas Mirzoeff is professor of media, culture and communication at NYU. A writer and activist, he has recently curated the exhibit “Decolonizing Appearance” at the Center for Art Migration Politics, Copenhagen (Sep 2018 – Mar 2019). His The Appearance of Black Lives Matter is a free e-book from NAME Publications and was also published in limited edition hard-cover with a graphic essay by artist Carl Pope and a poem by Karen Pope.