The Twoness of Black Time and Being
Habiba Ibrahim revisits the dialectical antagonism that underlies her book, Black Age – circum-Atlantic struggle between time-extraction and time-redemption, waged over black embodiment as “age.” Turning from a global structure of struggle to the twoness of blackness itself, this lecture considers “twinning” as a frame for conjoined temporalities and states of being. At once melancholic and magic, twinning contrapuntally expresses the aporia of modern black existence, as experienced in the twenty-first century. Engaging with the Du Boisian twoness of double-consciousness and African-diasporic views of twinship that straddles two worlds and vexes linear temporalities, this lecture shifts from the impasse of twinning to the mobility it enables between and through its two sides. It considers the case study of Dawoud Bey’s The Birmingham Project (2013), a series of large-scale photographs arranged into diptychs honoring the 50th anniversary of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. Across diptychs, black children who are the same ages as the victims killed on September 15, 1963, twin with adults who are fifty years older. Across the photographic image, paired panels, time, and age, irredeemable loss and enchantment conjoin for the common cause of committing to a future.
Date: 9 November 2023, 17:00
Venue: RAI Seminar Room
Speaker: Habiba Ibrahim (Washington)
Part of: American Literature Research Seminar
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Members of the University only
Editor: Katy Terry