Sign up by sending an e-mail to queerformalism@gmail.com, with your name, and in case you want to earn the 1 ECT, your student number and institutional affiliation.

This lecture takes as its foundation a suite of seemingly staid realist portraits by the Haitian painter Louis Rigaud exhibited during the 1884 World’s Cotton Centennial in New Orleans. These paintings portray Haitian heads of state from Toussaint Louverture through Lysius Salomon, who was president during the exposition. While the lecture will touch on the prominence of Haiti, symbolic and actual, within a burgeoning international Black consciousness, it will focus on the eccentricities of Rigaud’s paintings, which Dr. McKee characterizes as a proto-modernist form of Black internationalism. Among these seventeen canvases there are prominent stylistic and anatomical deformities: tropical chiaroscuro backgrounds at the edge of dissolution, architectonically stiff uniforms, clumsily rendered hands, eyes set askew on the face, and physiognomies that verge on caricature. Dr. McKee positions this suite of paintings in relation to the use of evolutionary theory by the Haitian anthropologist Anténor Firmin to affirm the humanity of blackness. Together Rigaud’s paintings and Firmin’s anthropological text employ evolutionary aesthetics to interrogate the value of deformity, as an errant articulation of subjecthood, for Black peoples in the ongoing struggle for personhood.

After C.C. McKee’s lecture (±45min), Stéphanie Noach will offer a formal response (±15min), after which we will before have time for questions and a discussion of the material, moderated by Eugenie Brinkema.

C.C. McKee is Assistant Professor of History of Art and Director of the Center for Visual Culture at Bryn Mawr College. They received a dual doctorate from Northwestern University and the École des Hautes-Études en Sciences Sociales in 2019 and were a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Copenhagen from 2022-24. Their research focuses on the intersections of art, colonialism, and natural science in the modern Atlantic World (c. 1750-1950) with an emphasis on the Caribbean. McKee also maintains an active curatorial practice, writes art criticism, and researches the exploration of colonialism and slavery’s ecological “afterlives” in contemporary Caribbean and African Diasporic art. Their writing has appeared in Art Journal, liquid blackness, Small Axe, CASVA Seminar Papers, Art Forum, and Hyperallergic among other venues. Their first book on the Danish bubblegum pop supergroup Aqua was published in 2024 in Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 Europe series with an accompanying vinyl record released by Warning in Berlin. Their second forthcoming book, Human Limits: Art, Ecology, and Race in the French Atlantic c. 1750-1900, is under contract with Duke University Press. They are currently at work on two book manuscripts: one on the oft-maligned electronic music subgenre psytrance and issues of white placelessness, the other, titled Elemental Blackness: Art and Environment in the 21st-Century Caribbean, focuses on contemporary queer and femme artists from the region and the diaspora.

Stéphanie Noach is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Leiden University, specializing in contemporary art and theory from the Caribbean and Latin America. Her research examines the material and conceptual entanglements of darkness, opacity, and Blackness and has been recognized with the Erasmus Prize for outstanding early-career scholarship, Leiden University’s Young Scholar Award, and a shortlist nomination for the national Karel van Manderprijs. Noach has been a Fulbright fellow at Harvard University and a visiting scholar at several national universities in Colombia and Cuba. Alongside her academic work, she curates exhibitions across Latin America and Europe.

Eugenie Brinkema is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, status-only Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto, and affiliated faculty at the University of Amsterdam. Her articles have appeared in numerous journals and her books include The Forms of the Affects (2014) and Life-Destroying Diagrams (2022), both published with Duke University Press.

The Queer Formalism Research Group convenes each spring for public and accredited sessions on queer theory and aesthetic inquiry. Keep an eye out on this website and social media for more upcoming sessions.

Students can earn 1 ECT by:

• reading Sylvia Wynter’s 1992 essay “Rethinking Aesthetics: Notes Towards a Deciphering Practice” (pdf will be shared upon registration)
• preparing a discussion question for the Q&A segment of the lecture  based on the assigned text
• attending the lecture.