A Smile Split by the Stars

You're invited to a special lecture by the JHI's 2024-25 Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Katherine McKittrick—A Smile Split by the Stars: On nourbeSe philip’s Revolutionary Intention. McKittrick is Professor of Gender Studies and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston. A reception with light refreshments will follow.

Abstract

Placed at the centre of NourbeSe Philip’s award-winning poetry book, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, “Meditations on the Declension of Beauty by the Girl with the Flying Cheek-bones” is a two-page poem that exposes the limits of colonial visual practices by simultaneously dwelling on and unraveling the textual-corporeal meanings of black femininity. The poem is punctuated by colonial descriptive statements that visually mark black womanhood (lips, hair, shape, cheekbones, and so on); yet Philip uses language and form—what I am calling a poetics of declension—to call into question the enfleshed categories that, in fact, make black femininity visually possible. Working alongside an audio archive that will be shared at the presentation, this working paper will work through how Philip textually unmakes blackness and gender without abandoning the optic terms of coloniality, thus poetically expressing what Sylvia Wynter calls a “revolutionary intention.”

This event is free and open to all. Light refreshments will be served so we do ask that you register so that we can get the catering numbers right.