Wall Faculty Associate Dinner Forum

Dear Wall Faculty Associates,  

Please join us for this special Wall Associate dinner forum with talk by Professor Hortense Spillers. 
Seats are limited. Please register by Wednesday, October 17.

To the Bone: Some Speculations on the Question of Touch

This talk marks an attempt to explore the ambiguous character of the sense of touch: at once the embodiment of the essence of self-ownership and the cancellation of this principle, touch decides the extent to which the individual is the subject of his/her own self-becoming, which defines the basis of freedom, or the exposed subject who is vulnerable to the reflexes of power, which demarcates the fundamental status of enslavement. In other words, the way one is touched and allowed to touch determines the basic difference between freedom and slavery. “To the Bone” examines the relationship between these apparent contrarieties and their convergence on a single locution, a common theme. 

Professor Hortense Spillers is an American literary critic, Black Feminist scholar and the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor at Vanderbilt University. A scholar of the African diaspora, Professor Spillers is the leading voice and most established figure in the study of Black Culture in North America and Europe.