Oct 7: On the Gelatinous: Three Movements

On the Gelatinous: Three Movements

a lecture by Kyla Wazana Tompkins
October 7, Tuesday
6:30 to 8 pm
Kyla Wazana Tompkins, English and Gender & Women’s Studies, Pomona College
Kyla Wazana Tompkins’ work in critical race and queer theory, food studies, and American cultural and literary history has thus far focused on the objects, people, and spaces where sociality and materiality meet, spaces where we can begin to limn the outlines of biopolitical world as it is experienced in the granular qualities of the everyday. This lecture, which Tompkins is developing as part of a new project (tentatively titled “So Moved”), will look at multiple forms of movement – affective, emotional, political and physical – as they coalesce in and around particular food textures, in this case, the soft squishiness of gelatin. “On the Gelatinous” considers three texts – Martin Delany’s Blake, Herman Melville’s Poor Man’s Pudding, Rich’s Man’s Crumbs, and a recent pornographic screensaver by Afro-Canadian artist David Findlay entitled “Generous Gesture” – in which the haptic, movemential, and tactile quality that we might term “the gelatinous” allows for authors and artists to theorize different forms of movement and sociality.
Department of Social & Cultural Analysis
20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor
Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality; Department of Social & Cultural Analysis; Nutrition, Food Studies, & Public Health; and NYU Press.