Event overview
A screening of 'Finally Got the News' plus a conversation with Ashwani Sharma and Alberto Toscano
In 1970 a group called the League of Revolutionary Black Workers produced a film called Finally Got the News. Documenting their strategies and tactics against the infrastructures of racial capitalism, the film presents an antidote to conventional historical wisdom. While many stories about what went on in Detroit highlight the sonic phosphorescence of black culture against a backdrop of industrial failure and urban rebellion, what the film shows is a different image of the city: an audio/visual image of what an actually existing urban revolution feels like when it’s working. In this session, we’ll watch the film and with Ashwani Sharma and Alberto Toscano discuss the film’s ramifications for feeling “a revolutionary tone” which maybe far more than just another record of political failure.
The event is free, all are welcome!
Ashwani Sharma is a Principal Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of East London (UEL), and a member of the Centre for Cultural Studies Research at UEL. Ash researches race, postcolonialism, visual, urban, digital and popular culture, and is completing a book on race, time and visual culture. He is also the founding co-editor of the journal darkmatter http://www.darkmatter101.org and is a member of the Black Study Group (London)
Alberto Toscano is Reader in Critical Theory and Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Theory. Alberto is the author of numerous books and articles including The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation Between Kant and Deleuze (2006), Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (2010), and (with Jeff Kinkle) Cartographies of the Absolute (2015).
Bleeding edges and solvent objects: racial capitalism and urban technopoetics
Series organised by Dhanveer Singh Brar & Louis Moreno
If the algorithmic city is an instrument of financial capital, then it represents racial capitalism’s latest spatial product, its new bleeding edge. This is something we learn from the black radical tradition: that technologies of financial accumulation presuppose spatial modes of dispossession. But according to Cedric Robinson the tradition makes another claim: that the dispossessed create ‘solvent objects’ able to dissolve the colonial hold of the metropolis.This programme explores the work of anti-colonial poetics, and asks if an insurgent technopoetics is emerging that can confront new urban modes of domination by renewing our habits of assembly. Through a series of talks, screenings and discussions we will listen to the alienating sensuosity of sounds, take in the opaque force of images, pay close attention to the gestural, and enter into the social production of thought.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 22 Nov 2018 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
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