Ishy Pryce-Parchment

Graduate Assistant - Student Life

Pronouns: he/they

Ishy completed their undergraduate degree at SOAS in London where they studied World Philosophies. Much of their undergraduate training was interdisciplinary and aimed at de-centering Western and Euro-centric ideas and systems of thought. His undergraduate thesis, titled “To Address Black Suffering is to Destroy the World: Afro-Pessimism, Deconstruction and the Meta-Aporia of Anti-Blackness,” performed an experimental consideration of metaphor and elliptical construction as an antidote to the cliff-edge represented by the paradigmatic stasis of social death at the center of Afro-pessimism. 

Ishy's Gallatin concentration will attempt to articulate the (potential) role of metaphor in Black studies in generating new and multiple ways of being/thinking Black in the world today. Their project is interested in thinking about how metaphor (metapherein: “to carry over, across”; “to transport”; "to transgress") might serve as a model or possible economy to escape the violence of the metaphysics deployed in western philosophical thought. How might seeking and traversing certain metaphors be read concurrently as both a literary-philosophical attempt to map the possible-worlds of Blackness and its movement of freedom, escape, refusal and sociality? 

Ishy has worked as a mentor and lecturer for Thinking Black, a decolonial and interdisciplinary education project which facilitates critical Black thought among young people. They are also passionate about abolitionism and union-strengthening work within the university and beyond.