Boundless Lecture & Conversation Series: Steve Nunez

Free with Museum Admission

Curating Ghosts: Abolition, US Colored Troops, and the Future of Haunted Memory examines the rich legacy of the US Colored Troop embodied commitment to, and bodily risk for, the cause of revolutionary abolitionism. Through a photographer’s lens, revolutionary theorist Steve Núñez reflects on Stephen Hayes’ Boundless installation at CAM as a shining example of the historical diligence and epistemic integrity required to reckon with the ongoing legacies of the violence central to capitalist systems.

In this community conversation commemorating the glorious US Colored Troop victory at the Battle of Forks Road that paved the way for the Confederate surrender at Appomattox, Núñez shares research from his forthcoming dissertation project, Abolition as Horizon & Anchor: Sociogeny, Anti-Violent Insurgency, and Militant Hope, which highlights thematic cohesion in abolitionist thought over time through philosophical portraits of David Walker & Maria Stewart, Frederick Douglass & Harriet Jacobs, W.E.B. Du Bois & Lucy Parsons, and George Jackson & Angela Davis. The talk will emphasize philosophical themes such as the centrality of the Southern roots of militant abolitionism, existential vs. political freedom, ignorance & responsibility, and the spectre of “hauntology”.

Importantly, the conversation will iterate the moral necessity of curating public (and quasi-public) spaces that tell the truth about the unsavory histories and haunted legacies that shape the spaces we move through today as a necessary condition for building just worlds of tomorrow.

Steve Núñez (he/they) is a truth-telling storyteller, graphic artist & photographer, educator, and revolutionary theorist from Wilmington, NC. As Steve performed contract work for the US Department of State as a Personal Security Specialist on an Embassy Protection Detail in Kabul, Afghanistan, they sought education as a tool to begin seriously process their personal relationship to structural violence and more intentionally interrogate the relationship between Islamophobia, anti-Blackness, and US public policy. As a scholar and champion of the insurgent abolitionist tradition of Southeastern North Carolina advanced through David Walker, Steve is a vocal proponent and militant practitioner of the contemporary movement to abolish the punishment enterprise, the ideology of racial capitalism at its root, and the carceral logics relying on violent punishment as an appropriate mechanism of social control.

Steve holds a Bachelor of Arts (BA) with majors in Philosophy & Religion (dual concentration) and Anthropology and minor certificates in Classical Studies and Middle East & Islamic Studies from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington (UNCW) as well as a Master of Theological Studies (MTS) in Religion, Ethics, and Politics from Harvard Divinity School. He is currently an advanced Doctoral Candidate in the Philosophy Department at the University of Connecticut (UConn) with areas of specialization in existential phenomenology, Africana philosophy, decolonial theory, and abolition & carceral studies. He is actively completing research for a dissertation entitled “Abolition as Horizon and Anchor: Sociogeny, Insurgency, and Hope,” a philosophical history which excavates the Black existential roots of abolitionism in the US through philosophical portraits of the abolitionist thought and practice of David Walker and Maria Stewart, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, W.E.B. Du Bois and Lucy Parsons, and George Jackson and Angela Davis.

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