Kara Keeling and Wendy Chun speak as part of “Racial Regimes, Digital Economies” symposium

Two speakers join the CMS/W colloquium as part of MIT Global Languages and Literatures’ “Racial Regimes, Digital Economies” symposium:

5pm: “Black Futures and the Queer Times of Life: Finance, Flesh, and the Imagination”

The University of Southern California’s Kara Keeling explores the implications of the efficacy of corporate futures scenarios for other modes of speculation, including those speculative cultural forms such as Afrofuturism that might afford creative imaginings of alternative futures. Extending Kodwo Eshun’s insights into the salience of the rise of corporate scenarios for Afrofuturist cultural production, Keeling considers what thinking certain Afrofuturist themes from within the long history of speculative capitalism might offer to present political investments in futurity.

Keeling is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies and of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC. She is author of The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Duke University Press, 2007) and editor (with Josh Kun) of a selection of writings about sound and American Studies entitled Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).

6pm: “Racial Infrastructures: A Conversation with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun”

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She has studied both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she combines and mutates in her current work on digital media. She is author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT, 2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT 2011), and Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT 2016).. She is co-editor (with Tara McPherson and Patrick Jagoda) of a special issue of American Literature entitled New Media and American Literature, co-editor (with Lynne Joyrich) of a special issue of Camera Obscura entitled Race and/as Technology and co-editor (with Anna Fisher and Thomas Keenan) of New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, 2nd edition (forthcoming Routledge, 2015). She is a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, ACLS and American Academy of Berlin Fellow, and she has been a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and a Wriston Fellow at Brown. She is also the Velux Visiting Professor of Management, Politics and Philosophy at the Copenhagen Business School; she has been the Wayne Morse Chair for Law and Politics at the University of Oregon, Visiting Professor at Leuphana University (Luneburg, Germany), Visiting Associate Professor in the History of Science Department at Harvard, of which she is currently an Associate.