Reimagining Border Crises through Black “Aliveness”: Spectacular Urgencies and Quotidian Lives

Guest speaker Lisa Flores, the Josephine Berry Weiss Chair of the Humanities and professor of Communication Arts and Sciences and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State, will deliver a public talk on “Spectacular Urgencies and Quotidian Lives: Reimagining Border Crises through Black “Aliveness.” In recent years, public imaging of U.S. border crises, especially at the U.S./Mexico border have trafficked in the rhetorical form of spectacle. While useful in generating public attention, spectacle operates through temporalities of now-ness, generating urgencies and immediacies through the dis/identification of viewers and audiences with the scene and the stage of spectacle. With attention to one moment of border spectacle, the September 2021 use of horses by Border Agents, Professor Flores will argue that if we consider different temporalities of urgencies, we can build reading practices that interrupt disidentification and advance rhetorical attention from the spectacle to the quotidian. In that shift, we build reading practices of what Kevin Quashie names Black “aliveness.”