October 7, 2025
Join the Department of African American Studies for the first talk in our Black Critical Theory Initiative by Professor Tyrone S. Palmer, Assistant Professor of English, Wesleyan University. This talk interrogates the centrality of the face to theories of affect, sociality, and racialization, offering a reading of defacement as a mode of violence which continually generates Blackness as a locus of negativity. Critically engaging the work of Hortense Spillers, Achille Mbembe, and Michael Taussig, among others, Professor Palmer will argue that theorizing anti-Blackness as a project of defacing violence serves as a rejoinder to understandings of anti-Black violence that are reliant on metaphors of the veil and the mask and attendant notions of interiority, dissemblance and humanity.