Doing Gender Lecture: Flesh Before Body, Earth Before World

On Monday 22 April, Dr Rizvana Bradley (University of California, Berkeley) will provide a Doing Gender Lecture, titled 'Flesh Before Body, Earth Before World'. Together with a workshop on April 19, this lecture is co-organised by Terra Critica: Interdisciplinary Network for the Critical Humanities, Critical Pathways and The Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies (NOG). Both the lecture and the workshop draw on Bradley's latest book Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form (Stanford UP, 2023).

In the lecture, Rizvana Bradley zooms in on a selection of works of art and reads the recent work of contemporary artist Sondra Perry to develop a critique of the metaphysical architecture of capitalist worlding, the phenomenological body-subject of worldly inhabitation, and their aesthetic reproduction in and through the logic of value. She argues that Perry’s artwork demands a reckoning with transatlantic slavery, the corporeal order of the world it fashioned, and their mutual constitution of the ecocidal drive of global capitalism.

Then, turning to Ed Roberson’s poem, “To See the Earth Before the End of the World,” Bradley shows how the phenomenological subject presumed by both the logic of value and the project of worlding cannot be disentangled from modernity's racially gendered imperative to cleave bodies from flesh and world from earth, thereby raising difficult but crucial questions regarding efforts to fashion social formations beyond the ecological catastrophe of capitalism. More details on the lecture and workshop can be found here. 

Rizvana Bradley

Rizvana Bradley is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies and Affiliated Faculty in the History of Art and the Center for Race and Gender at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as the 2023-24 Terra Foundation Visiting Professorship for American Art at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Bradley’s book, Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form, was published in 2023 by Stanford University Press. Her scholarly work has been published in Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism, Film Quarterly, Black Camera: An International Film Journal, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, TDR: The Drama Review, Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, and Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. Her art criticism has also been published in The Yale Review, Artforum, e-flux, Art in America, and Parkett.