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African American Literature and Culture Now Symposium: Keynote Lecture: Stephen Best

The End of Black Studies
Thursday, October 31, 2019
4:15-6:00 PM
Gallery Hatcher Graduate Library Map
The African American Literature and Culture Now symposium brings together a group of leading scholars in African American humanistic fields to identify and discuss the central questions that animate 21st-century Black Studies.

Prof. Stephen Best (Berkeley), author of None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life (Duke, 2018) and The Fugitive's Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (U of Chicago Pree, 2004), will deliver the keynote lecture of the symposium, titled "The End of Black Studies."

The End of Black Studies

This talk will address the dual ends of black studies—that is, the way the field's conditions of origin (think of Richard Wright’s White Man, Listen!) are always bound up with a sense of the field's imminent exhaustion, if not inutility (What project remains once he does?). These conflicting ends are a kind of Gordian knot with which the black scholar of black studies cannot fail to grapple—the question of how far “to define Black people as reactions to White presence,” as Toni Morrison once put it, never completely beyond the horizon of debate. And where Morrison redefined black studies, freeing black writing from the imperative of having to address a white reader, those changes could never quite accommodate James Baldwin, whose work fell into some disfavor upon his death in 1987. This talk will frame the recent resurgent interest in Baldwin in terms of an aesthetic turn within black studies, arguing that his invocations of the category of “beauty,” while not a clean cutting of the Gordian knot, offer a means of grappling with origins, both one's own and that of the field.
Building: Hatcher Graduate Library
Website:
Event Type: Lecture / Discussion
Tags: Free
Source: Happening @ Michigan from University Library, Institute for Research on Women and Gender, History of Art, Comparative Literature, Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, William L. Clements Library, Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, Department of American Culture, Multi Ethnic Student Affairs - MESA, Department of Sociology, Department of English Language and Literature, Department of Political Science, Germanic Languages & Literatures

The Thursday Series is the core of the institute's scholarly program, hosting distinguished guests who examine methodological, analytical, and theoretical issues in the field of history. 

The Friday Series consists mostly of panel-style workshops highlighting U-M graduate students. On occasion, events may include lectures, seminars, or other programs presented by visiting scholars.

The insitute also hosts other historical programming, including lectures, film screenings, author appearances, and similar events aimed at a broader public audience.