Rhode Island School of Design - Fall 2025 Humanities Forum "The Hold is Also an Embrace: Tracing Haunting Erotics in Black Life.”

The third event in the 2025–26 Humanities Forum features Naimah Petigny, Assistant Professor in the Department of Literary Arts and Studies.

Petigny's talk, "The Hold is Also an Embrace: Tracing Haunting Erotics in Black Life," contends with historical traces, afterlives, and latent erotics, exploring Black aliveness as it is seeded within contemporary art and performance. She details how haunting emerges as a supple orientation—a structure of relation—toward death, pastness, abjection, and embodied knowledge. Returning to and re-reading Audre Lorde's Uses of the Erotic, Petigny follows Lorde's assertion that a "fed-up-ness" with suffering must sustain erotic power. The talk seeks after playful, unexpected, ephemeral, and suspended experiments with suffering, abjection, and loss in art and performance—experiments marked by an infidelity to the projects of re-dress and a refusal to anchor Blackness in abjection. Ultimately, it develops haunting erotics as a Black femme and feminist methodology and offers holding/embrace as a matrix and orientation toward pastness, embodiment, and the creative excavation of the erotic from the abject.

Colleagues are cordially invited to join us for the third event of the academic year on Wednesday, December 3, 2025, from 12:00 to 1:30 PM at 20 Washington Place, Auditorium 143 on the first floor.