Wednesday, March 16, 12:15–1:30pm
Dr. Chamara Moore, "Electric Black: Race, Phenomenology, and Black Superheroes"
How can Black Speculation be used as a form of healing not only in speculative texts like Octavia Butler's Fledgling, but also with particularly harmful tropes like the Electric Black Superhero? This talk will explain how these tropes make light of the suffering Black people have experienced historically from harmful electrified tools of the state ranging from the tazer to the electric chair. The talk will conclude with a brief overview of how Speculative fiction creators have reinvented the phenomenology of the Black body through the speculative elements of their work in visual texts like Black Mirror and HBO's Watchmen.
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Thursday, March 17, 12:15–1:30pm
Dr. Maya Hislop, “Black Women Imagine Violence as Healing: Systems of Destructive Justice in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora and State of North Carolina v. Joan Little, 1974-75”
In this talk I’ll be taking an in-depth examination of the landmark case, State of North Carolina v. Joan Little, 1974-1975 in order to uncover a crucial reading of the criminal justice systems at work in the contemporaneous Black feminist novel, Corregidora. Adding to previous scholarship which often considers Corregidora to be a novel about trauma, I read it as a novel about transformative justice. I argue that Jones uses literature to do what the law cannot: assert a complex relationship between black women, the law, and sexual violence that dismantles binaries around agency and healing. In the remains of these dismantled binaries, the main characters of Corregidora showcase what I call an Afropessimistic or millenialist justice system built around failure, self-destruction, and the destruction of others.
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Monday, March 21, 12:15–1:30pm
Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe, “Molten Black: Reading Climate, Racial Formations, and Geological Metaphors”
Environmental thought has been foundational and formative to American literature and rhetoric. Reckoning with the climate crisis, in this talk, Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe will examine the uneven formations of race and racial meaning in metaphors of geology. Exploring the reading practices and literacies embedded in the rhetoric of natural history that have led to how we read race, how might we rethink Suzan-Lori Parks and George Jackson in conversation with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charles Darwin? From the 19th century Guano Age to dormant volcanoes to the very bedrock of island formations the matter of blackness erupts to the surface revealing tensions and the fault lines of racial division and hierarchy.
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Friday, Mar 18, 11:00am–12:30pmAnita Raychawdhur, "Queer Witchcraft: Macbeth, King James I/VI’s Patriarchal Anxieties, and Desiring White Identity"
This talk considers the staging of queer women's kinship in William Shakespeare's Macbeth in relation to early modern nation and racial formation. In particular, Macbeth participates in the creation of a white English identity that casts out and racializes "unruly" Scots of the past through the Weird Sisters and the Macbeths, who are associated with marginal locales such as heaths and highlands. The Weird Sisters further reject normative womanhood, thus presenting an alternative to the fantasy and futurity of an English identity predicated upon legible whiteness. From the prophesying of the gender-bending witches to the moment of Macbeth’s destruction, aided by English forces, Macbeth allows for consideration of how Jacobean England positioned Scotland’s past as non-white and queer.
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Wednesday, March 23, 12:15–1:30pm
Dr. Hanh Bui, "Call the Midwife: Birthing Blackness in Titus Andronicus"
This paper examines a neglected context for understanding epistemologies of race in Shakespeare’s drama: the role of the midwife. In sixteenth and seventeenth-century England, midwives performed an important cultural function by not only assisting women in labor, but also by pronouncing the health, sex, and—most critically—paternity of an infant. As Caroline Bicks has noted, this was a time when a midwife had considerable influence over how a body was interpreted at the moment of its birth, thereby determining its reception in the community. Nowhere in Shakespeare’s canon is the midwife’s privileged authority more manifest—and threatening—than in Titus Andronicus, where the midwife’s role includes bearing witness to an infant’s race. After Tamora, Empress of Rome, delivers a baby fathered by her lover, Aaron the Moor, he asks the question: “how many saw the child?” By subsequently killing the birth attendants, Aaron calls attention to how controlling the destiny of his black-hued baby depends upon silencing the midwife’s knowledge. The paper further explores how narratives of foreign midwives and birthing practices in the period’s writings helped to construct the non-English as racialized “other.”Join Zoom Meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86779729052?pwd=R09jNktpVGFtbGdVOHRTZCtpSkVMUT09
Thursday, March 24, 12:15–1:30pmDr. Sawyer Kemp, title and abstract TBA
Join Zoom Meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87118934820?pwd=aFVXVWROci9iQUlybzk0Sm9UM3Y1Zz09