Professor Tina Campt, Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Director of the Africana Studies Program, Barnard College, New York, engages three innovative conceptual frameworks for theorizing diasporic formation that depart from traditional emphasis on mobility, resistance and expressiveness as primary idioms of black culture.

Her talk elaborates the concepts of quiet, stasis, and fugitivity, and uses them to consider what they tell us about what we overlook, overhear, erase or leave unremarked in diasporic formations. Vernacular photography offers an important and frequently overlooked window into practices of diasporic dwelling and fugitivity, when we attend differently to the quiet practices of stasis through which they image fugitivity. Reading these three keywords together through the photography of a Black German family offers a provisional glimpse into the possibilities of theorizing some of the fugitive practices often rendered unvisible in other diasporic frames.

This is one of our keynote speakers for DePaul University’s conference, Remapping the Black Atlantic: (Re)Writings of Race and Space which took place April 12-14. More information on the conference can be found here.