Events & Calendars "On Ruin and Cultural Disaster"

On Monday, Feb. 17, at 4:30 p.m. in Room 100 of Clark House, Lewis Gordon, a specialist in Africana philosophy, politics, religion, Black existentialism, Black intellectual history and critical race theory at the Institute for African American Studies and a philosophy professor at the University of Connecticut, will present a paper entitled “On Ruin and Cultural Disaster.” This is the fourth presentation in a series of seminars that will take place this year as part of the Copeland Colloquium Seminar Series “Permanent Catastrophe?”

Gordon is the founder and director of the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies and the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought at Brown University, where he was the founding chairperson of the Department of Africana Studies. His books include "Her Majesty’s Other Children" (Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), "Existentia Africana" (Routledge, 2000), "Disciplinary Decadence" (Paradigm, 2006) and "An Introduction to Africana Philosophy" (Cambridge UP, 2008).

Gordon’s talk will outline our treatment of the mythopoetics of disaster and explore the concept of cultural disaster as argued in his book written with Jane Anna Gordon, "Of Divine Warning: Reading Disaster in the Modern Age" (Paradigm, 2009).

To view a draft of the paper that will be presented at this seminar, please see the Copeland Colloquium website: https://www.amherst.edu/academiclife/colloquia/copeland_colloquium/desc…-