Carrie Mae Weems' 1995-1996 installation "From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried" provides an opportunity to meditate on the discourses of woundedness that permeate much thinking on race, affect, and masochism while allowing us to theorize brown jouissance. Followign Lacan, jouissance is taken to be the experience of being a body, "'something lived by a body when pleasure stops being pleasure." This lecture dwelled on jouissance in order to retain the ambivalence that is provoked by Weems' invocation of tears. Brown jouissance offers to consider this opacity as deeply connected to the flesh, sensation, and strategies of resistance.
Sponsored by the Department of American Studies and the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences