What is Blackness? How do Black people define, much less own an identity that was first invented by white European and U.S. thinkers to justify slavery and then colonialism?
This seminar will use selected texts from three canonical books of 20th century Black political and cultural thought–W.E.B. Du Bois’ “The Souls of Black Folk”; Frantz Fanon’s “Black Skin, White Masks,” and the anthology “Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out”–to analyze and explore the past, present and future of Blackness as both identity and intellectual/creative expression, especially for those bodies deemed “too Black” or “not Black enough”. While these three books will serve as the “launching pad” for lecture and discussion, we will go where our interests lead us.
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Black in Time: Space, Place and Belonging in the Black and African Diasporas
Mon, Oct 8, 20186:30 pm to 8:30 pm -
Tue, Oct 9, 20186:30 pm to 8:30 pm
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Wed, Oct 10, 20186:30 pm to 8:30 pm
Michelle M. Wright is the Augustus Baldwin Longstreet Professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta where she teaches courses on Black literature, culture and theory in the Black and African Diaspora. She is the author of Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora (2004) and Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (2015) as well as co-editor of Domain Errors! A Cyberfeminist Handbook (2003), Reading the Black German Experience (2003) and Blackness and Sexualities (2007). Prof. Wright has contributed to a range of scholarly journals and media outlets, including LA Review of Books, ArtForum International, Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, Nka: Journal of African Art, The Root, and the Chicago Sun-Times.
Opitz, May, Katharina Oguntoye & Dagmar Schultz (trans. Anne V. Adams; Foreword by Audre Lorde). Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out. University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. Reading: Entire PDF.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. 1967. Reading: Chapters 1, 4, and 8
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Bantam Classic, 1903. Reading: Chapters I, II, III and XIII
