Hannah Arendt famously proposed that politics takes place in the space of appearance. However, the enslaved, women and children were excluded from the classical polis, leading Judith Butler to recently claim 'the right to appear.' In this presentation, Mirzoeff will show how the Black Lives Matter movement has effectively claimed this right to appear using the tactics that he will name as co-presence, persistent looking, articulations of Black and blackness, and fugitive movement. The spaces in which this appearance takes place are spaces of connection and racialized spaces. By claiming the right to appear, Black Lives Matter produces an 'impossible' relation of unboundedness, a moment of liberation.

The lecture is open to the public.

Speaker: Nicholas Mirzoeff

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