Event Description
What, semiotically speaking, is a perspective? Synthesizing the notions of voicing in linguistic anthropology and looking in film and visual studies with Fanon’s phenomenology of racialized perception, Constantine Nakassis situates perspective as a constitutive feature of semiosis, and vice versa, sign activity as constitutive of how perspectives evenementially and historically emerge and circulate. To exemplify this process, he analyzes select aspects of the 2018 trial of Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke for the murder of a black teenager, Laquan McDonald. He focuses in particular on the contextualized courtroom use of a forensic digital animation created by the defense to provide the perspective of Van Dyke in the event of his murder of McDonald.
Event Speaker
Constantine Nakassis, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago
Event Information
Free and open to the public. No registration required. For more information, please visit the event webpage. Hosted by the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University.
