Dr. Gourab Chatterjee, Assistant Professor (English), School of Language, KIIT Deemed to be University, Bhubaneswar delivered an expert talk “Historicity and Temporality of Black Identity” at Adamas University, Kolkata on February 23, 2022. The webinar was organized by the Department of Language and Literature, School of Liberal Arts and Culture Studies, Adamas University to celebrate Black History Month.
Dr. Chatterjee’s talk primarily explored two major aspects of Being, namely historicity and temporality as discussed by Martin Heideggar in his seminal book, Being and Time and tried to connect them with the notion of Blackness. It emphasizes the complexity of black identity, and how it is constructed, as opposed to whiteness, and presented as a non-being. It also talked about the ontological impossibilities of Black Identity and how the fact of being black problematizes the notion of historicity with its belatedness.