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Roundtable with
Sandra Harvey, American Artist, and Jian Neo Chen
October 24 from 3 to 4:30pm Pacific Time

First Forum 2020: Passing concludes with a roundtable conversation between Sandra Harvey, American Artist, and Jian Neo Chen moderated by Zakiyyah Iman Jackson.

Sandra Harvey

Sandra Harvey researches the production of race and gender through surveillance technologies originating in colonialism and chattel slavery. Her book project, "Passing for Free, Passing for Sovereign: Blackness and the Formation of the Nation," traces narratives of race/gender passing within science, settler colonial law, conceptual art, and Enlightenment philosophy. It contextualizes accusations of race/gender passing in the U.S. as rooted in 19th-century surveillance of fugitive slaves. In this way, she asks after the assumptions about blackness that emerge in the passing regime and how these might influence contemporary notions of freedom, sovereignty, the nation, and the citizen.

Dr. Harvey's additional research engages feminist representations of blackness in Caribbean (Cuban and Puerto Rican) modern and conceptual art.

American Artist

American Artist is an artist whose work considers black labor and visibility within networked life. Their practice makes use of video, installation, new media, and writing. Artist is a resident at Red Bull Arts Detroit and a 2018-2019 recipient of the Queens Museum Jerome Foundation Fellowship. They are a former resident of EYEBEAM and completed the Whitney Independent Study program as an artist in 2017. They have exhibited at the Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco; the Studio Museum in Harlem; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and Koenig & Clinton, New York. Their work has been featured in the New York Times, Artforum, and Huffington Post. They have published writing in The New Inquiry and Art21. Artist is a part-time faculty at Parsons The New School and teaches at the School for Poetic Computation.

Jian Neo Chen

Jian Neo Chen is associate professor of queer studies in the departments of English and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies and director of the Asian American Studies program (2020-2021). Chen is affiliate faculty in the Film Studies program and former director of Sexuality Studies (2017-2018). Their research focuses on transgender and queer aesthetics and embodied practices in literature, visual culture and contemporary theory and their reimagining and reconstruction of social relations and movements. Their first book, Trans Exploits: Trans of Color Cultures and Technologies in Movement (Duke University Press, 2019), explores the displaced emergences of trans of color cultural expression and activism through performance, film/video, literature and digital media by the second decade of the twenty-first century, following fifty years of minimal civil rights reforms and renewed state and social technologies of racial gendering. Chen's research, teaching, writing and cultural organizing seek resonances with movements for gender, sexual, indigenous and racial liberation across different sectors and territories of the transnational US empire.

Chen serves on the editorial board of the Transgender Studies Quarterly. They were an invited visiting scholar at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University in Spring 2012. Before joining Ohio State, they were assistant professor and postdoctoral fellow at the NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study from 2009 to 2011. Their curated transmedia projects have screened with the 6-8 Months Project, hosted by Kara Walker Studios in New York City; the New York MIX 24 Queer Experimental Film Festival; the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus and the NYU Asian/Pacific/ American Institute. Before graduate studies, Chen developed and organized a popular literacy, workplace rights program for Asian immigrant women working in informal garment, electronics, hotel and restaurant economies in Oakland, CA. They also produced community events and raised funds to counter state, public and interpersonal violence impacting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning communities in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson

Zakiyyah’s research explores the literary and figurative aspects of Western philosophical and scientific discourse and investigates the engagement of literature and visual culture with the historical concerns, knowledge claims, and rhetoric of Western science and philosophy. While we often isolate African diasporic literary studies from the fields of science and philosophy, her scholarship reveals these fields’ shared concerns. By reading Western philosophy and science through the lens of African diasporic literature and visual culture, we can situate and often problematize authoritative conceptualizations of being and, thus, demonstrate that literary studies have an important role to play in the histories of science and philosophy.

Her first book, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World was published by New York University Press in May 2020 as part of the Sexual Cultures series. Becoming Human argues that key African American, African, and Caribbean literary and visual texts generate conceptions of being and materiality that creatively disrupt a human-animal distinction that persistently reproduces the racial logics and orders of Western thought. She is currently at work on a second book, tentatively titled Obscure Light: Blackness and the Derangement of Sex-Gender. This project opts to tarry with rather than attempt to reconcile, or find a dialectical solution to, the perceived paradox of “black woman.”

Site design / construction by Alex Hack.