Attend a talk hosted by the UNL Departments of Communication Studies and English, “Zombies Are Real: Blackness, Conspiracies and the Post-Truth Wars,” led by Eric King Watts from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The event will be held on Wednesday, Feb. 28 at 3 p.m. in the Heritage Room at the Nebraska Union on City Campus.
Professor Watts argues that Post-Truth is the name we have assigned to a powerful repetitive mode of discourse that, in part, legitimizes conspiracies and anxieties regarding how blackened bio-threat bodies will be unleashed upon society.
Post-Truth is not a set of lies; it is a pre-condition for tribal war. The lecture will set forth Post-Truth as a disorienting and frightening “dissemblage” that is driven by fantasies of sovereignty, rituals of militarization and the colonization of expertise. He outlines the formal features of Post-Truth by examining a docudrama produced by the Discovery Channel called “Zombie Preppers.” In the end, he speculates about how Post-Truth metastasizes in the social body as “brain damage.”
Eric King Watts is associate professor of Media and Technology Studies at UNC Chapel Hill. Watts examines the diverse phenomena of African American public voice and its relation to representations of the black body, meanings of blackness and the shape of civic culture. He is author of “Hearing the Hurt: Rhetoric, Aesthetics, and the Ethics of the New Negro Movement.” (University of Alabama Press, 2012)