AAS Faculty Brown Bag Lecture: Ashon Crawley

Wednesday, November 6, 2019 3:30 PM to 5:00 PM
Bryan Hall 229

“Blackpentecostal Sound and Augmented Reality”

This talk explores the relationship between the practices of prayer and praise that emerge from within Blackpentecostal spaces and the emergence of an art  imagination and practice that includes analogue painting, performance and digital augmented reality applications. I am arguing that a Blackpentecostal imagination, a Blackpentecostal method, can inform a black feminist, blackqueer anethical move towards liberation, justice and joy.

 

Prof. Crawley is Associate Professor of  Religious Studies and African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. His research and teaching experiences are in the areas of Black Studies, Performance Theory and Sound Studies, Philosophy and Theology, Black Feminist and Queer theories. His first book project, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (Fordham University Press), is an investigation of aesthetics and performance as modes of collective, social imaginings otherwise. He is currently working on three projects; The Lonely Letters (Duke 2020), an autobiofiction that explores the relationship between blackness, quantum mechanics, mysticism and love; a third book, tentatively titled “Made Instrument,” about the role of the Hammond Organ in the Black Church, in Black sacred practice and in Black social life more broadly; and a third project about blackness and a critique of western constructions of mysticism. 

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