The WSU Humanities Center invites faculty, students, staff, and the community to a Brown Bag talk given by Walter Lucken IV (Ph.D. Candidate, English) on the topic of the "We are Here to Stay: Lampedusa in Hamburg and the Oceanic Rhetorics"

 Abstract: This presentation will suture two major currents in the history of rhetoric, namely anti-racist efforts in the history of rhetoric and the study of oceans and other nonhuman actors as rhetorical agents. In short, by engaging the work of Rinaldo Walcott on “the Black aquatic” alongside Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ notion of “being ocean as praxis”, I hope to extend LuMing Mao’s call in the third Octalog that we practice “the art of recontextualization”, and re-read the history of rhetoric to more fully account for its role as engine of emancipation and a means of denying it, as well as the crucial role of oceans, seas, and rivers as rhetorical ecologies. My intervention will take as its objective the staging of an encounter between the historiography of rhetoric and recent discussions in Black Studies concerning the role of bodies of water as mediators of access to the category of humanity.

Please RSVP to this event for the zoom link.