Bio
David Carré is a doctoral student in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University pursuing additional certification in Africana Studies. Their research examines the racially gendered implications of various theories and exercises of plasticity: a term connoting the capacity to give and receive form. David attends in particular to philosophical disagreements as to whether plasticization impels the total dissolution of existing forms or connotes a kind of symbolic integrity maintained in spite of deformation. Emphasizing the conceptual challenge posed to such debates by blackness, David traces captive flesh across a wide range of modern experiments with plasticized being: namely, corporeal dissimulation, visual abstraction, and monetary liquefaction. Reading black flesh as an inexhaustible Spillersian “resource for metaphor,” David’s project aims to temper rash investments in evanesced embodiment as a means to manumission. At stake in their investigations is the transvaluation of ontological resistance and virtuality.
Their most recent subprojects examine:
• The tendency of Jamaican maroon cosmology to venerate plasticized black being alongside more pessimistic academic criticism of ontological plasticity as antiblack.
• The effaced labor of black femininity within the future-hastening work of avant-gardist abstract art movements in early 20th century Europe (i.e. le Cubisme, de Stijl, Futurismo, etc.).
David currently holds positions as a Graduate Fellow in the Black Bibliography Project (BBP) at Rutgers and Yale universities, Graduate Assistant in the Rutgers Race and Gender Equity (RAGE) Lab, and Graduate Mentor in the HLLC-Price Humanities Scholars Program at Rutgers —Newark. Their previous appointments include a 2024-25 Graduate Fellowship at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis (RCHA). They have taught various courses in gender studies at both Rutgers University and Barnard College.