Black studies emerged within the university as a product of an institutional crisis with the ongoing condition of unfreedom for Black students, community, and life in 1969. As an interdisciplinary field of study, it has been subject to much evolution over the past half century. New ruptures in the field require a revaluation of the role of the university, the academic and the sociopolitical terrain that Black studies must navigate. Against the backdrop of a pandemic, the uprisings of summer 2020 and renewed institutional calls for anti-racist reforms, what is the function of critical knowledge production toward the liberation of Black people? How can Black studies meaningfully meet the imperatives of education and communities under crisis? Why is it important to think of Black studies, life, and culture beyond crisis?
Dr. Bedour Alagraa is Assistant professor of Political and Social Thought in the Department of African and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Alagraa received her PhD from the department of Africana Studies at Brown University in the Spring of 2019, and was an Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Fellow during her time at Brown. She also holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Toronto, and a Masters in Race, Ethnicity, and Post-Colonial Studies from the London School of Economics. Her book manuscript is entitled The Interminable Catastrophe: Fatal Liberalisms, Plantation Logics, and Black Political Life in the Wake of Disaster, and charts a conceptual history of catastrophe as a political category/concept (rather than Event), via its inauguration in early modern natural science and empiricist debates, and subsequent crystallization as a concept on the plantation. More specifically, her manuscript explores modern-day ecological catastrophes against the discourse of imminent disaster and anthropocene studies and instead, considers these occurrences as expressions of the durability of plantation modes of social relations, rendering them political conjunctures rather than ecological Events.
More broadly, she is interested in Black Political Thought, especially Caribbean political thought, African anti-colonial thought, and Black Marxism(s). Bedour has been published in several journals, including Critical Ethnic Studies, Contemporary Political Theory, The CLR James Journal of Caribbean Philosophy, and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society. She is the co-editor of a volume on Black Political Thought, forthcoming from Pluto Press, and recenty worked on archiving Sylvia Wynter’s literary and academic works alongside scholars from Brown, and Duke University. Bedour is also co-editor, alongside Anthony Bogues, of the ‘Black Critique’ book series at Pluto Press, as well as an edited volume of Sylvia Wynter’s unpublished essays.
Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly is the 2020-2021 Visiting Scholar in the Race and Capitalism Project at the University of Chicago. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Carleton College. A scholar of political theory, political economy, and intellectual history, Dr. Burden-Stelly is the co-author, with Dr. Gerald Horne, of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History. Her published work appears in journals including Small Axe, Souls, Du Bois Review, Socialism & Democracy, International Journal of Africana Studies, and the CLR James Journal. She is also the guest editor of the forthcoming “Claudia Jones: Foremother of World Revolution” special issue of The Journal of Intersectionality and a regular contributor to Black Perspectives, the award-winning blog of the African American Intellectual History Society. As a visiting scholar, she will complete her book manuscript, tentatively titled Black Scare/Red Scare, in which she examines the rise of the United States to global hegemony between World War I and the early Cold War at the intersection of racial capitalism, imperialism, anticommunism, and the superexploitation and oppression of Blackness.
The Poetics of Black Women: A Genealogy for Black Study by Ashley M. Jones
Ashley M. Jones holds an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University, and she is the author of Magic City Gospel (Hub City Press 2017), dark / / thing (Pleiades Press 2019), and REPARATIONS NOW! (Hub City Press 2021). Her poetry has earned several awards, including the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, the Silver Medal in the Independent Publishers Book Awards, the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry, a Literature Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, and the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. She was a finalist for the Ruth Lily Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship in 2020. Her poems and essays appear in or are forthcoming at CNN, POETRY, The Oxford American, Origins Journal, The Quarry by Split This Rock, Obsidian, and many others. She teaches Creative Writing at the Alabama School of Fine Arts and in the Low Residency MFA at Converse College. Jones co-directs PEN Birmingham, and she is the founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival. She currently serves as the O’Neal Library’s Lift Every Voice Scholar and as a guest editor for Poetry Magazine.
In this presentation, Ashley M. Jones reads selections of her poetry and presents a masterclass on the form and method of Black women poets who inform her award winning trio of collections, Magic City Gospel (2017), dark//thing (2019), and Reparations Now! (2021). Jones considers the labor and poetics of Black women educators like June Jordan and Sonia Sanchez who taught some of the first Black studies courses in 1968 as a pathway to poetry. From Lucille Clifton to Gwendolyn Brooks, Jones teaches us how Black study and liberation must account for the poetics of Black women then and now.
Jones assembled a Google Doc with resources to follow her talk.
La Tanya S. Autry has organized exhibitions and programming at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Yale University Art Gallery, Artspace New Haven, Mississippi Museum of Art, and other institutions. Autry is the curator for a new exhibition titled “Imagine Otherwise” that expresses theh boundlessness and fierceness of Black Imagination and love despite ongoing antiBlackviolence as it thinks with Christina Sharpe’s groundbreaking book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Featuring artists like Shikeith, Imani Dennison, Amber N. Ford, and Antwoine Washington, this multimedia exhibition spotlights Black pathways to self-determination and collective liberation through photographic, sculptural, mixed media, and video-based installations. The careful navigation, or “wake work,” to use Sharpe’s term, operates beyond representational politics as it interrogates spatial and temporal tensions of disenfranchisement, resistance, memory, visibility, loss, and (re)invention across Black cultures.
Through her graduate studies at the University of Delaware, where she is completing her Ph.D. in art history, La Tanya has developed expertise in the art of the United States, photography, and museums. Her dissertation The Crossroads of Commemoration: Lynching Landscapes in America, which analyzes how individuals and communities memorialize lynching violence in the built environment, concentrates on the interplay of race, representation, memory, and public space.
Rinaldo Walcott is Associate Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and formerly the Director of Women and Gender Studies Institute at University of Toronto. His research is in the area of Black Diaspora Cultural Studies, gender and sexuality.
In The Long Emancipation, Rinaldo Walcott posits that Black people globally live in the time of emancipation and that emancipation is definitely not freedom. Taking examples from across the globe, he argues that wherever Black people have been emancipated from slavery and colonization, a potential freedom has been thwarted. Walcott names this condition the long emancipation—the ongoing interdiction of potential Black freedom and the continuation of the juridical and legislative status of Black nonbeing. Stating that Black people have yet to experience freedom, Walcott shows that being Black in the world is to exist in the time of emancipation in which Black people must constantly fashion alternate conceptions of freedom and reality through expressive culture. Given that Black unfreedom lies at the center of the making of the modern world, the attainment of freedom for Black people, Walcott contends, will transform the human experience worldwide. With The Long Emancipation, Walcott offers a new humanism that begins by acknowledging that present conceptions of what it means to be human do not currently include Black people.