ICYMI: Charis was on Good Morning America!

News and Events From Charis Circle

We are so excited to celebrate The Death of Vivek Oji: A Novel by Akwake Emezi on Good Morning America! As a queer and feminist bookstore, it feels especially important to celebrate and platform trans books nationally!

Emezi's novel is a deeply hopeful and transcendent story about what it means to be seen and understood by your friends and family and to live your truths.

Watch the full clip here.

Histories of Violence: Thinking Art in a Decolonial Way

Brad Evans interviews Lewis R. Gordon

Q: In terms of your critical understanding, rather than focusing on the colonial practices of art you have attended to the ways colonialism is brought to art as an invasive force. In this regard, might we see art as being, by definition, something that is necessarily anti-colonial and indeed revealing of something pre-/post-colonial in the temporality of its demands and claims upon the liberation of non-Eurocentric ways of living?

A: Yes. My argument is one that precisely links art to freedom. It is, however, not freedom in and of itself. It is always reaching beyond itself as a testament to our condition. This is why excellent art speaks across generations. It is only partially in its time. Bad art, however, suffers from a form of implosivity. This, by the way, is also how I define oppression. Or to put it another way, the subjugation of a life is a subjugation of its arts of expression. Human life thrives when it reaches beyond itself. Oppression pushes us back into ourselves to the point of being trapped in our bodies and eventually mental illness. What is madness but losing our mind? I also describe this phenomenon as epistemic closure. It means no longer having to learn; knowing little is to know all. This mentality could be brought to art. It collapses art or artistic practices into forms of closed idols. This is what colonialism, racism, and all forms of oppression do. That is why they are saturated with violence.

Yet there is a paradox. Colonialism and other forms of oppression are, after all, human practices through which human institutions of violence are constructed and maintained. What this means is that they could never be complete. They are attempts, as idols and expressions of idolatry, to close human reality through reducing it to one of its elements. In the case of racism, that means the narcissism, as we have seen over the past few hundred years, of white supremacy. The obvious limitations of all such efforts are that even those who built them eventually find them unlivable and seek alternatives even from those they supposedly “conquered.” Colonized people fight, and part of their resistance is in their effort to reclaim their value, often through producing art that transcends the idols imposed on them. Colonial art eventually suffers the fate of all those who imagine they are the end of art, history, and thought. They become boring, unimaginative, irrelevant.

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Click here to register for Fear of Black Consciousness: Lewis R. Gordon

in conversation with Hortense J. Spillers

January Programs

Fear of Black Consciousness : Lewis R. Gordon in conversation with Hortense J. Spillers--Sat. 1/15/22, 1:00-2:00pm on crowdcast

Charis welcomes Lewis R. Gordon in conversation with Hortense J. Spillers for a discussion of Fear of Black Consciousness. Lewis R. Gordon's Fear of Black Consciousness is a groundbreaking account of Black consciousness by a leading philosopher. This event is co-hosted by the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History.