On Interiority: An Exploration of the Infrastructures of Subjectivity

Join the Whitney Humanities Center for this Humanities Now lecture by artist and philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva. Author of the field-changing books Toward a Global Idea of Race and Unpayable Debt, Ferreira da Silva writes on crucial global issues, which she approaches from an anticolonial black feminist perspective.

Denise Ferreira da Silva is the Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at NYU. Her artistic and academic work reflect and speculate on questions crucial to contemporary philosophy, aesthetics, political theory, black thought, feminist thought, and historical materialism.

She is the author of scholarly books including Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007) and Unpayable Debt (2022) and coeditor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (2013).

In collaboration with Arjuna Neuman, her filmography includes Serpent Rain (2016), 4Waters: Deep Implicancy (2018), Soot Breath/Corpus Infinitum (2020), and Ancestral Claims/Ancestral Clouds (2023). With Valentina Desideri, she organized The Sensing Salon, a studio practice that expands the image of art beyond objects, events, and discourse to include the healing arts.  Ferreira da Silva has performed shows and given lectures in prominent artistic spaces, including the Centre Pompidou (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London), MASP (São Paulo), The Guggenheim and MoMA (NYC).

The day before Ferreira da Silva’s lecture, she and her codirector Arjuna Neuma will join us for a screening and discussion of their experimental film essay, Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims (2023). Come for the film and stay for a talkback with the directors, moderated by Yale professor of Spanish and Portuguese Santiago Acosta. Learn more about the screening here.