Please join us for a talk by Dr. Paul C.Taylor, a W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy and Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses primarily on aesthetics, the philosophy of race, American philosophy, and Africana philosophy.

In a reflection on what she calls “the future of time,” Toni Morrison discusses art that responds to moments of crisis with, as she puts it, “a mourning, a requiem, a folding away of the future.” She goes on to look for redemptive possibilities in expressive culture, on the grounds that “one looks to history for the feel of time [but] one looks to art for signs of its renewal.” This lecture will look for Morrison’s signs of renewal in some contemporary culture work, beginning (and perhaps ending) with the film “Wakanda Forever” and the New Museum’s “Grief and Grievance” exhibition.