@ Virtual event on Zoom

The Racial Justice & Equity Task Force will hold its Spring 2021 Presentation Series on “‘Whither Now and Why’: African American Literature and American Futurity” presented by
RBC Professor Thom Addington, Instructor of English. The event will be held virtually on Zoom and is open to the public.

https://richardbland.zoom.us/j/98090275027
Meeting ID: 980 9027 5027

In a 1993 interview with the Paris Review, Toni Morrison identified the transformative power of African American literature in its evocation of “a more human future” (Morrison np). Indeed, the tradition constitutes “an archive of feelings,” a “tradition of the tension between individual affect and historical structure” (Crawford 6). How has the African American literary tradition enabled Black people in America to negotiate their present and (re)imagine their future, and what might (re)visiting this tradition offer to our current negotiation of imbricated crises? This session will focus on what we may learn about ourselves and the futurity of the United States – that is, the potential for its continuation and its renewal – from the African American literary tradition. We will consider how writers as Sterling Allen Brown, Toni Morrison, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and James Baldwin (among others) rendered “a more human future” in their work.