“Africa’s Past, Black Futures:
The Afterlives of Pharaonic Egypt in Art and Politics”
In-Person and Virtual Roundtable Conversation*
Advance registration is required
Featuring Kathryn Howley, Erich Kessel, and Nadia Yala Kisukidi, this roundtable will consider the many afterlives of “ancient” Africa, focusing particularly on Pharaonic Egypt. Using the Met’s current exhibition Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now as a springboard, we will examine how Africa’s pre-modern history is constantly being reimagined in relationship to modern and contemporary art and politics. We will consider the implications of presenting African kingdoms and kings as a source of Black civilizational greatness, exploring how Black artists and intellectuals engage with the African past to advance alternative visions of freedom and identity. Additionally, we will discuss the role of civilizational discourse in global liberation movements, diasporic racial formations, and nationalism. Join us for lively debate and informal discussion as we explore the implications of remaking and consuming the past.
The moderator for the roundtable will be Prita Meier, Associate Professor of African Art History at the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU.
Kathryn Howley is the Lila Acheson Wallace Assistant Professor of Ancient Egyptian Art at the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU. An archaeologist and art historian, she investigates the role of material culture in intercultural exchanges, focusing on Egypt and Nubia during the first millennium BCE. Her research combines Egyptological, anthropological, and art historical approaches to explore how objects shaped social systems and cultural interactions. She directs fieldwork at Sanam, Sudan, examining Nubian use of Egyptian material culture under the Kushite dynasty. She is currently completing her first book, The Royal Tombs of Nuri: Interaction and Material Culture Exchange between Kush and Egypt c. 650-580 BC.
Erich Kessel is Assistant Professor of Black Diaspora and African-American Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU. His research examines how racial violence shapes the conceptual and historical frameworks of visuality, aesthetics, and embodiment. Integrating interdisciplinary approaches from Black Studies, Marxist critique, psychoanalysis, and media theory, his work interrogates art, images, and exhibitions as reflections of racial hierarchies and capitalism. His current book project investigates the racial, aesthetic and political-economic work of the idea of the image across a variety of artistic practices, media, and forms of sociality since the 1970s. He is co-editor of An Excess of Quiet: Selected Sketches by Gustavo Ojeda, 1979–1989.
Nadia Yala Kisukidi is Associate Professor of French Literature, Thought and Culture at NYU. She is a philosopher specializing in French and Africana thought. She has taught at the University of Geneva and Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis and served as Vice-President of the Collège International de Philosophie (2014–2016). A fellow at Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination (2022–2023), she co-curated the Yango II Biennale in Kinshasa. Her works include Bergson ou l’humanité créatrice (2013), Dialogue transatlantique with Djamila Ribeiro (2021), and the novel La Dissociation (2022). Kisukidi also contributed to Colonisations. Notre histoire (2023) and Borders, Human Itineraries, and All Our Relations (2023)
*The program will be presented onsite at the James B. Duke House and live-streamed to those who join us virtually. Limited in person seats are available.
Please note that due to the sensitive nature of the roundtable, this event will not be recorded.