Image

Commonwealth Honors College will host Daphne Lamothe as its Black Heritage Month speaker on Feb. 12, fostering a conversation about time, culture and the humanities. Lamothe, provost and dean of the faculty at Smith College and a scholar of Africana studies, will present “The Virtues of Slowness in Times of Urgency: Black Time and Aesthetic Possibility” from 5 to 6 p.m. in the Commonwealth Honors College Events Hall.

Lamothe’s lecture will explore how society’s focus on speed and efficiency, heightened by technological change and artificial intelligence, can come at the expense of reflection and analysis.

“Americans tend to idealize ideas of the future and the pursuit of progress,” she says, noting that lived experience is far more complex than a linear sense of time. Drawing on Black literature, history and culture, Lamothe argues the Black experience reveals a more layered understanding of temporality, shaped by memory, history and imagined futures.

Her book, “Black Time and the Aesthetic Possibility of Objects,” developed in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s death in 2012 and the reelection of President Barack Obama—a juxtaposition that inspired her concept of “Black aesthetic time.” The theory examines how racialized life exists across multiple temporal realities and connects to artistic and literary movements such as Afrofuturism.

The lecture is free and open to all.