Speaking Engagements & Public Scholarship
Speaking Engagements & Public Scholarship
Elsewhere & Otherwise: Imagination & Worldmaking in the Black Queer Studies Collection
This exhibition is meant to highlight the rich holdings found within the Black Queer Studies Collection. The materials brought together in this exhibition recognizes the cultural productions by Black queer subjects from across the African diaspora. The grounding ethos animating this exhibition is the connection between the personal and the political, the individual and the communal, the local and the global. This exhibition attempts to elucidate how the personal desires and yearnings of Black queer subjects are a metonym for a larger process of world-shifting change. This exhibition demonstrates how desire for Black queer self-making is tantamount to a desire for a world beyond normative constraints. Through creative expression and critical inquiry across multiple media and disciplines, Black queer subjects present the possibility of new ways of beings from their particular vantage point in our globalized world.
Click the image or follow the link below:
https://exhibits.lib.utexas.edu/spotlight/elsewhere-otherwise
“Tectonically Speaking”: Writing A Black Geopolitics Through Speculative Fiction
We are supposedly in the middle of a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene and its attendant discourses are deeply temporal; often speaking doubly to both a history of human-produced climate crisis on one end and bleak futurity on the other. The imaginaries of the Anthropocene are often wrought with images of catastrophe. However, the question must be asked: What does this naming of catastrophe truly mean for Black diasporic subjects who have always already been enduring social and environmental disaster? How do the way that we temporalize and name systems of human interaction with the environment take into account Black diasporic subjects? As a way to get at these variously interwoven threads, I turn to the speculative work of novelist NK Jemisin to investigate how Black diasporic artist are reimagining climate crisis and the way forward through and beyond the limits of Anthropocene discourses. NK Jemisin is an award-winning African American writer, who often works through the genre of fantasy. Jemisin crafts worlds different from our own, but whose imagined realities reflect the deep sociohistorical fissures of our own. With The Broken Earth Trilogy, Jemisin maps new speculations on the human, temporality, and spatiality.
Watch here or follow the link below:
