Foucaultian Insights for Black Male Subjectivity

Foucaultian Insights for Black Male Subjectivity

Miejsce: Pałac Staszica, room 161

Czas: Piątek, 6 grudnia, godz. 17:30-19:30

Opis: 

Joseph Smith, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Philosophy, Undergraduate Director for Africana Studies, SIU Carbondale, USA

December 6, 2024, 17:30 – 19:30

Room 268, Staszic Palace, Nowy Świat 72, Warsaw

With the shift of white-power structures from a “pre-civil-rights” era to our “post-civil-rights” context, the discursive production of the pathological domain of the urban, Black male underclass emerged within the human sciences as one form of its regenerative arc beginning in the 1960s.  White intellectuals who were proponents of the underclass theory, such as James Q. Wilson, Charles A. Murray, and John J. Dilulio Jr., made arguments that the demographic and social statistical urban, lower-class, Black male population group were pathological, predatory criminals who constituted the new “threat” to society that needed to be contained, controlled, policed, and imprisoned.  During this same historical period, within certain pockets in Black popular culture, the character-type of the urban, Black, male as defensively assertive, and criminal/thug emerged as an embodied resistant strategy to white-power structures.  However, rather than offering effective tools of resistance, the above-mentioned character-type of urban, Black, males function as a moment of the concealment and internalization of features of white-power structures, and thus furthers it. 

For this reason, I selectively employ Foucault’s works Discipline and Punishand The History of Sexuality.  I focus on Foucault’s theoretical account of the discursive production, within the human sciences, of what he calls “quasi-natural pathologized personality-types.”  Specifically, I explore Foucault’s theoretical account of the role the discursive production of quasi-natural pathologized personality-types plays, as a strategy within modern forms of power, to manage pathologized populations.  What I want to discern from exploring the discursive production of quasi-natural pathologized personality-types are aspects of the objectification and internalization processes that distribute bodies within the binary registers of normal/abnormal and normal/pathological as a possible theoretical framework to analyze the urban, Black, male as defensively assertive, and criminal and thug personality-type as internalizing objectifying white-power structures.

Joseph L. Smith has a joint appointment as an Assistant Professor in the School of Africana and Multicultural Studies, and the School of History and Philosophy, at the Southern Illinois University, SIU Carbondale, USA. Smith’s teaching and research interests include Black Male Studies, Africana Philosophy, Foucault Studies, Prison Studies, and the emergence of the Breton-Woods Institute, WTO, Bilateral and Regional Trade Agreements.

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