Lecture on Phillis Wheatley, the first Black woman poet in America, at the Gotha Research Centre

The lecture deals with a colonial-historical contextualisation of philosophical aesthetics. On the one hand, it deals with the question of the extent to which David Hume and Immanuel Kant were involved in legitimising the reduction of enslaved people to ‘mere bodies’, as they denied Africans any aesthetic capacity. Secondly, it is about Phillis Wheatley, the first poet of the Black Atlantic, whose poetic work belied the racist use of philosophical aesthetics and liberated herself from enslavement through her poems. With the ‘aesthetic procedures’ developed by Saidiya Hartman, the possibility appears of confronting the empty spaces in the archive of violence of enslavement and attributing an abolitionist meaning to poetics.

Iris Därmann is Professor of Cultural Theory and Cultural Aesthetics at the Institute for Cultural Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Together with Andreas Gehrlach and Thomas Macho, she has been the editor of the ‘Undisciplined Books’ series at De Gruyter Verlag since 2019. In 2022, she was awarded the Sigmund Freud Prize for academic prose by the German Academy for Language and Poetry. Her most recent publications include: „Aus der Nacht heraus. Kinderperspektiven“ (Berlin, 2.10.2025), „Sadismus mit und ohne Sade“ (Berlin, 2023), „Widerstände. Gewaltenteilung in statu nascendi“ (Berlin, 2021), „Undienlichkeit. Gewaltgeschichte und politische Philosophie“ (Berlin, 2020; 2. Aufl. 2021, span. 2024).

The event will take place on 12 June at 5:15 pm. Participation via Webex is possible, please contact  forschungszentrum.gotha@uni-erfurt.de.