Presentation Title
Brutal Misprisions: Woolf, Moten, Hartman
Original Abstract (short bc part of a panel proposal)
In her May 1925 diary, Woolf notes passing a Black man while riding a bus; she wonders, “what were his thoughts? Of the degradation stamped on him, every time he raised his hand & saw it black as a monkeys outside, tinged with flesh colour within?” Drawing on Black studies, this paper situates Woolf’s diary entry in a history of white intellectuals imagining the plight of Black people. It discloses an anti-Blackness animating Woolf’s sympathetic imagination & speculates on the possibility of an anti-racist phenomenology that can forestall brutal misprisions complicit in occluding Black sentience & that can recognize Black joy/suffering without situating white bodies in the place of Black ones.
Sketching a Present 
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