For our second Religion and Politics Series lecture, the Religious Studies Program welcomes Dr. Vincent Lloyd who will speak on “Beyond Human: Audre Lorde, Spirituality, Judgment.” This talk is funded with support from the Anonymous Fund, the Law School, and African American Studies.
Talk: Beyond Human: Audre Lorde, Spirituality, Judgment
Date and Location: 4:00PM, Thursday, December 5, 2024. Room 1418, Van Hise Hall. Street Address: 1220 Linden Dr. Madison, Wisconsin, 53706.
Abstract: For the Caribbean-American writer Audre Lorde (1934-1992), what characterizes the human is not our capacity to reason but our capacity for emotion. Yet on her account, emotion is not a conversation-stopper; emotion calls for discernment and judgment—themselves distinctively human capacities, but capacities not circumscribed by the limits of the human. She argues that her experience as a Black, lesbian feminist attunes her to this account of the human-beyond-the-human. Lorde is often read as committed to gender essentialism or identity politics; advocates of those positions often do draw on Lorde. I argue that attending to the religious language and commitments found in Lorde’s work challenges these readings and makes Lorde’s work fruitful for a time when the human and the humanities are put in question.
Speaker: Vincent Lloyd is Professor and Director of the Center for Political Theology at Villanova University. His books include Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination (Yale, 2022) and the co-edited Political Theology Reimagined (Duke, 2025). He has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, Emory’s James Weldon Johnson Institute, and University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Research in the Humanities.