Academic Events, Special Events

“What Is Seen Cannot Be Unseen: What Kant Can(not) Tell Us about Racial (Self-)Perceptions” – Workshop with Dr. Huaping Lu-Adler

Name: “What Is Seen Cannot Be Unseen: What Kant Can(not) Tell Us about Racial (Self-)Perceptions” – Workshop with Dr. Huaping Lu-Adler
Start: 2024-11-15T13:00:00-05:00
End: 2024-11-15T14:00:00-05:00
Location: Georgetown Humanities Conference Room – Old North 205

Please join the German Department for a workshop with Dr. Huaping Lu-Adler on Friday, 11/15, titled “What Is Seen Cannot Be Unseen: What Kant Can(not) Tell Us about Racial (Self-)Perceptions.” This event will be held from 1:00-2:00 pm in the Georgetown Humanities Conference Room, Old North 205. Lunch will be available starting at 12:30 pm and please RSVP here by 11/13!

The two texts for the workshop will be sent out on 11/14, or you can access them now through the RSVP link.

Event Information:

There is a distinction between race concepts as representations and race concepts as tools or as political ideas serving ideological functions. We examine the legacies of Kant’s raciology in the latter terms. In a racialized world, one cannot unsee race and should not try to address racial injustices in a colorblind way. To illustrate, we consider two novellas published not long after Kant’s death. Both revolve around racial identities in a racially hegemonic world. The first novella, Die Verlobung in St. Domingo by Heinrich von Kleist, highlights the tragic trap of racialization. Kant’s theory of abstraction helps to explain the inescapability of racialization depicted in this novella. The second novella, William der N–r by Caroline Auguste Fischer, follows the growth of a “Negro” who struggled with Du Boisian double consciousness but came to embrace his identity as a black man.

Huaping Lu-Adler is Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. Her current work sits at the intersections of Kant, critical philosophy of race, and social epistemology. She is the author of two monographs, Kant and the Science of Logic (Oxford, 2018) and Kant, Race, and Racism (Oxford, 2023). She is now working toward a new monograph tentatively called Slavery and Kant’s Political Philosophy. She has also been writing a cluster of papers on linguistic-epistemic injustice and the politics of knowledge production. Methodologically, she is influenced by the decolonial theory, Black feminist thought, and standpoint epistemology.