Date/Time
Date(s) - 04/16/2015
6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
Location
Starr King School for the Ministry
Join us for ““He Has Showed Up More Fully By Disappearing” Tupac Shakur, Afrofuturism, and Trans/humanism in the Digital Era of Illusion” lecture by Dr. Roy Whitaker.
In the spirit of technological humanists and Afrofuturist scholars, Michael Eric Dyson musing over Tupac Shakur’s postmortem existence claims that “[Tupac] has shown up more fully by disappearing.” Similar to Dyson in Holler If You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac, humanist thinkers like Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation and Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia appreciate the novel ways technology transforms human experiences helping us blaze the life-line. Using Tu-pac’s digitized hologram-performance at the Coachella musical arts festival in 2012 as key evidence, this paper argues that hip hop is fertile ground for thinking “transhumanistically” about the confluence between modern technology and humanist values. When Afrofuturism hip hop studies and transhumanist studies are put in conver-sation, the paper finds that categories such as the “inhuman,” “posthuman,” and “transhuman” are appropriate and timely lenses to discern what it means to achieve “virtual immortality.”
Roy Whitaker is an Assistant Professor of American Religious Diversity at San Diego State University. His research pushes beyond traditional topics in African American Religious Stud-ies by examining how African Americans construct and navigate their religious and racial identity outside a Black Church context. He is particularly interested in Comparative Religion, Atheist and Humanist Studies, and Hip Hop Religious Studies. He is presently researching and writing on Martin Luther King, Jr. and the age of religious pluralism, and Hip Hop as an in-digenous religious category.
This lecture will be on Thursday, April 16, 2015, at 6:00 PM.
Sponsored by the Office of the Dean of Faculty. Light refreshments will be served.
