American Studies Spring Colloquium, Sandra Harvey, "Memory’s Material: Dementia, Racial Terror, and Black Feminist Markings"

Professor Sandra Harvey
African American Studies - University of California, Irvine

Abstract: The hippocampus is the area of the brain responsible for episodic memory and is one of the first to show signs of neurodegeneration in patients with Alzheimer’s Disease. Research has shown that increased chronic stress is associated with a reduction in function and size of the hippocampus. If this is the case with chronic stress, what can be said of the effects of traumatic events such as racial terror on the body, both as metaphor and as a concrete flesh? This talk takes the story of Curlie Buckins, a black mother of seven, who fled Mansfield, Louisiana for Los Angeles, California in 1940. Buckins lived with Alzheimer’s disease for at least a decade before her death. While her short-term memory was severely limited, her long-term memory remained intact for much longer. During this time, Buckins began anxiously retelling the story of the disappearance of her father, precipitated by the threat of his lynching in Mansfield when Buckins was a child. In this talk, I ask after the relationship between anti-black terror and black feminist practices of healing through memory when memory and recognition is, biomedically-speaking, impaired and often impossible. I draw on black feminist writings to chart the way calls for memory, even when wrestling with the status of evidence and proof, exceed the technological capacities of History’s archive and biomedicine’s material understandings of the brain. Considering this, I ask, what might be the purchase, in these circumstances, of forgetting.

Bio: Dr. Harvey is an Assistant Professor at the University of California at Irvine. She researches the production of race and gender through surveillance technologies originating in colonialism and chattel slavery. Her forthcoming book, "Passing for Free, Passing for Sovereign” traces narratives of race/gender passing within science, settler colonial law, and Enlightenment philosophy. It contextualizes accusations of race/gender passing in the U.S. as rooted in 19th-century surveillance of fugitive slaves and entangled in the management of the state’s biopolitical concerns. Dr. Harvey’s work has been published in Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, Post Modern Culture, Contemporary Political Theory, and in the anthology Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness.