Image: Colloquium: Imagining in Oppressive Contexts, Or, 'What's Wrong with Blacking Up?' Friday, September 24, 12:40–1:30 pm Fine Arts Room 400 (Balcony Theatre) In this talk, philosopher Nils-Hennes Stear will connect a number of threads from the philosophy of language, aesthetics, the sociology of race, and feminist philosophy to explain an important way that the practice of Blackface is morally flawed; extend feminist and critical race work on speech act theory to imaginings; and carve out a position that avoids the problems besetting existing views on the ethics of imagining offered in the recent aesthetics literature. Dr. Stear completed his graduate work at the University of Michigan. He is currently a postdoc in aesthetics at the University of Auburn. Starting in 2022, he will begin as a Humboldt Fellow at the University of Hamburg, Germany, where he will be completing a monograph, Beyond Moralism, currently under contract. This presentation is jointly sponsored by the Department of Theatre and Film Studies and the Aesthetics in the Expanded Field Research Group.
