Susan B. Anthony Lecture - Hacking the Color Line: Black Lives Matter, Code-Switching, and the Entanglements of the Performative

Hawkins-Carlson Room

Lecture/Performance

The Susan B. Anthony Lecture is the keynote to SBAI's annual International Graduate Student Research Conference. This year the keynote will feature Tavia Nyong'o, Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, and Theater Studies at Yale University.

Hacking the Color Line: Black Lives Matter, Code-Switching, and the Entanglements of the Performative

Code-switching has historically been central to African-American culture. In the wake of the post-racial era (an idea recently disavowed by President Obama in his farewell address) what is the future of code-switching and double-consciousness as oppositional performative strategies? The recent phenomena of Black Twitter (and more generally, of digitally-encoded assemblages of intersectional black feminism) has been countered by the rise of an anti-Black Twitter, which has claimed many targets for harassment and helped elect a president. Is online activism fated to be drowned out by this “white noise”? Or will code-switching be reinvented for a digitally networked and increasingly post-literate age? This talk will investigate these questions in dialogue with recent queer and black feminist theories of hacking, coding, and entanglement.