Properties: Talks

An afternoon of talks by Patricia Ekpo, Aisha Finch, and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, whose work and thought have been formative to Cameron Rowland’s exhibition Properties on view at Dia Beacon. 

Patricia Ekpo is incoming Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Art in History of Art & Visual Studies at Cornell University. She is also a Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University’s Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. Ekpo’s work uses black critical theory, visual art, and psychoanalysis to interrogate the role of antiblackness in constituting modern space, body, and psyche. She has work published and forthcoming in Parapraxis Magazine, where she is a contributing editor, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Art Journal, and other edited volumes and exhibition catalogues. 

Aisha Finch is Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. She is a historian of the African Diaspora whose research encompasses the histories of slavery in Cuba, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic World, with particular attention to Black practices of freedom, refusal, and fugitivity. She also specializes in Black feminist knowledge production, activism, and cultural work in the US and in global contexts, particularly Latin America and the Caribbean. She is the author of Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba: La Escalera and the Insurgencies of 1841-1844, and the co-editor of Breaking the Chains, Forging the Nation: The Afro-Cuban Fight for Freedom and Equality, 1812-1912. Her current project explores the gendered histories of marronage in the Hispanophone Caribbean, and the ways in which Black feminists and racial justice activists in Latin America turn to these histories of marronage/cimarronaje to rethink the possibilities of Black survival, resistance, and autonomy. 

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson is Associate Professor of Theory in the Literature Program at Duke University. Jackson’s research investigates the engagement of African diasporic literature, film, and visual art with the historical concerns, knowledge claims, and rhetoric of Western science and philosophy, revealing the disavowed literary and aesthetic projects of science and philosophy and clarifying the fundamental function of antiblackness in their metaphysics. She is the author of Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World: winner of the Harry Levin First Book Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association, the Gloria Anzaldúa Book Award from the National Women’s Studies Association, and the Lambda Literary Book Award for LGBTQ Studies.