Event

February 24, 2025 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall Ways of Relating in Dire Times: Lessons from Black Living Dr. Krystal A. Smalls University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

ABSTRACT: In this moment of mounting US fascism, many of us are strategizing ways of keeping one another alive. We are also cultivating ways of keeping one another free, fed, educated, and healthy because we understand that while staying alive and living fully are tightly bound to one another, they are not the same thing. Taking up relationality as a mode of deep living, this talk explores some of the affective, aesthetic, and intersubjective dimensions of Black languaging and also suggests that there are racialized and racializing “ways of relating” that transcend verbal language to create diasporic legibility, familiarity, intimacy, and animosity through and around difference. It also suggests that there are human and humanizing ways of relating that shape our broader efforts to stay alive and live deeply. Through ethnographic examples and Black theory, we will glean the raciosemiotics of an expressive esotericism and aesthetic that help constitute Black Diasporic relationality, space, and place - and that often provide protection and pleasure in dire conditions. As many continue to turn to global Black resistance movements as guides for collective survival and liberation, this talk asks what we might learn when we also closely study the mundane practices of worldmaking and lifemaking that have sustained Black peoples throughout the longue duree of antiblack racism.

BIOGRAPHY: Krystal A. Smalls is Associate Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Telling Blackness: Young Liberians and the Raciosemiotics of Contemporary Black Diaspora by Oxford University Press (2024).