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Blackpentecostal Noise and Dark Matter

November 14, 2016

Blackpentecostal Noise and Dark Matter

Ashon Crawley

Thursday, April 6, 4-5:30pm, in the Barnett Center Collaboratory, 141 Sullivant Hall

What if the epistemology, the way to think worlds, that was responsible for thinking the very possibility for the discovery or dark matter in quantum physics is not distinct from that which produces a search for the Holy Spirit? What, in other words, can attention to dark matter, neutrinos in particular, elucidate about Blackpentecostal religious worlds? This talk gives attention to the noise making of Blackpentecostal adherents in order to consider a way to think the imaginative possibilities of quantum physics. The distinction between the scientific and the religious become undone by the concept of feeling as the grounds for thinking relation. Building on the work in Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility, the talk attempts to think together what might seem to be disparate ways of thinking worlds known and unknown, the religious and the scientific, the noisy and the musical, with hopes of considering the epistemologies of quantum physics as Blackpentecostal. 

Ashon Crawley is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at University of California, Riverside. His research and teaching experiences are in the areas of Black Studies, Performance Theory and Sound Studies, Philosophy and Theology, Black Feminist and Queer theories. His first book project, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (Fordham University Press), is an investigation into black queer aesthetics and performance as modes of collective, social imaginings otherwise.

Sponsored by the Music and Sound Studies Working Group, the Department of African American and African Studies, and the Department of Comparative Studies.