Reading

New School New Books: A Reading Series

Apr 21, 2023

11:00am–4:00pm ET

Social Justice Hub, University Center
The New School, 63 5th Avenue, 5th Floor, New York, NY

New School New Books: A Reading Series brings together faculty from across The New School in recognition and celebration of milestone publications in the fields of film studies, fashion, musicology, design, environmentalism, and philosophy. Hosted in conjunction with the Vera List Center’s iteration of the roving exhibition and decolonial reading room, the C& Center of Unfinished Business, this multimodal event launches a series of programs that activate the reading room as a site of intervention, liberation, and repair. With books housed within the installation and other recent publications, the authors cover topics ranging from primatology to punk aesthetics. The readings are divided into three sections: Material Identities, Sounding Democracy, and Public(s) and Common(s).

Participants
Amanda Bellows, Simon Critchley, Gwenda-lin Grewal, Pablo Helguera, Nicolas Langlitz, Ricardo Montez, Julie Beth Napolin, Brittnay L. Proctor, Evan Rapport, Ann Stoler, Radhika Subramaniam, Jilly Traganou, Ricky Tucker, Terry Williams, and Genevieve Yue.

Hosts
VLC Assistant Director of Editorial Initiatives Re’al Christian, Senior Director/Chief Curator Carin Kuoni, and Curator and Director of Programs Eriola Pira.

Schedule
11 am–12 pm: Material Identities

Amanda Bellows, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts
American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination, 2021

Evan Rapport, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts
Damaged: Musicality and Race in American Punk, 2021

Ricardo Montez, Schools of Public Engagement
Keith Haring’s Line: Race and the Performance of Desire, 2021

Genevieve Yue, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts
Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality, 2021

Gwenda-lin Grewal, The New School for Social Research
Fashion | Sense: On Philosophy and Fashion, 2022

Terry Williams, New School for Social Research
The Soft City: Sex for Business and Pleasure in New York City, 2022

1–2 pm: Sounding Democracy

Ricky Tucker, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts
And the Category Is…Inside New York’s Vogue, House, and Ballroom Community, 2022

Julie Beth Napolin, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts
The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form, 2021

Simon Critchley, The New School for Social Research
Bald: 35 Philosophical Short Cuts, 2021

Brittnay Proctor, Schools of Public Engagement
Minnie Riperton’s Come to My Garden, 2022

Pablo Helguera, College of Performing Arts
“When Institutional Attitudes Become Form,” 2023

2:30–3 pm: Celebration Toast

3–4 pm: Public(s) and Common(s)

Radhika Subramaniam, Parsons School of Design
“Notes for a Seedy Politics,” in Maria Thereza Alves: Seeds of Change, 2023

Nicolas Langlitz, The New School for Social Research
Chimpanzee Culture Wars: Rethinking Human Nature alongside Japanese, European, and American Cultural Primatologists, 2021

Ann Stoler, The New School for Social Research
Interior Frontiers: Essays on the Entrails of Inequality, 2021

Jilly Traganou, Parsons School of Design
“Girl with Maquette: A Memoir of Prefigurative Imaginaries at Work,” in ARENA Journal of Architectural Research, 2022

 

Outside of the public events being held in the space, the C& Center of Unfinished Business is open to the public by prior reservation and appointment only. Please fill out this form in order to request an appointment, which is necessary to access the space. Please make your appointment at least one day in advance. You will receive an email confirming your appointment time.

Brittnay Proctor, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Race and Media in the School of Media Studies at The New School, reading from Minnie Riperton’s Come to My Garden. Part of New School New Books: A Reading Series. Presented by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. Social Justice Hub, University Center, The New School, April 21, 2023. Photo by Re’al Christian.

New School New Books: A Reading Series is organized by Re’al Christian and Carin Kuoni as part of the C& Center of Unfinished Business at The New School, presented with the support of the Daisy Schapiro Lectureship Fund.

The Vera List Center is committed to ensuring that our programs are accessible to and inclusive of all. Please let us know when registering if you need any accommodations.

The Spring 2023 programs of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics are generously supported by members of the Vera List Center Board, other individual donors, and the following institutional donors:

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
The Boris Lurie Art Foundation and the Schaina and Josephina Lurje Memorial Foundation
Bridge Philanthropic Consulting
The Dayton Foundation
The Ford Foundation
Italian Council
The Kettering Fund
Mellon Foundation
The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation
and Pryor Cashman LLP

We also gratefully acknowledge the support of The New School, our academic home.

Related

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New School New Books 2024

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Exhibition

C& Center of Unfinished Business

Apr 1–May 26, 2023

Panel

Libraries as Correctives: C& Center of Unfinished Business, Keleketla! Library, and Sister Library with Asia Art Archive

Apr 24, 2023

Conversation

Libraries in Practice: Tending Toward Liberation

May 18, 2023

Red text on a white background: C& Center of Unfinished Business at The New School Vera List Center for Art and Politics Contemporary And (C&) Social Justic Hub, University Center, The New School 63 5th Avenue, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10003 April 1–May 26, 2023 The Vera List Center for Art and Politics and multimedia platform Contemporary And (C&) present the C& Center of Unfinished Business at The New School, a roving reading room and exhibition that speaks to the persistence and presence of colonialism in contemporary life. Conceived by Contemporary And’s Julia Grosse, Yvette Mutumba, and Mearg Negusse, the project offers a selection of key, and, at times, unexpected texts that spark discourse on the enduring structures that continuously undergird colonial legacies in modern society. “Unfinished,” here, subtly echoes the “post” in postcolonial—hinting at an incomplete reckoning with colonialism and its evident and insidious aftermaths. The Vera List Center iteration of the exhibition features a curated selection of books, including titles from The New School faculty, alumni, and the VLC Fellows Library. Inaugurated during the 2022 VLC Forum and 30th anniversary celebration, the VLC Fellows Library is a collection of publications by each of the forty-four fellows the Vera List Center has hosted over its thirty-year history, celebrating and making available their research and work. Both the installation and accompanying broadsheet publication are designed by New School students. As with previous iterations, the reading room upends traditional forms of display in both content and form. Books meander through angular shelves next to, above, and across from each other in challenging, experimental, unconventional ways to mirror the tension and discomfort historically embedded in discussions on colonization. To this end, the C& Center of Unfinished Business occupies The New School’s Social Justice Hub, an interstitial space designed and designated for conversations on equity and solidarity across communities. The reading room plays host to public programs that inscribe the VLC’s 2022–2024 Focus Theme Correction* into colonial legacies and postcolonial realities. Conversations with local and international libraries as well as a public reading series explore libraries as sites of intervention, liberation, and repair.

Broadsheet, Catalogue

C& Center of Unfinished Business