A series of podcasts on the Caribbean critical theory tradition, from Suzanne Césaire through the creolist movement.
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These conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theory to the black Atlantic to sites of indigenous resistance and self-articulation, as well as the complex geography of thinking between traditions, inside traditions, and from positions of insurgency, critique, and counternarrative.
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Podcasted process pieces from my course “Cinema of the Black Atlantic” at University of Maryland.
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Podcasted conversation on critical and literary theory, drawing on a range of theorists from Europe, the United States, Caribbean, and Latin America. Our title is drawn from Audre Lorde's essay "Poetry Is Not a Luxury," where she writes that poetry fashions a language where words do not yet exist. How does theory make words and world new, attuned, and embedded within inventive and inventing lived-experience, tradition, and cultural production?
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Podcasted process pieces from my course Black Existentialism. The course introduces one of the most important and potent mid-century intellectual movements - the existentialist movement - through a series of black Atlantic thinkers. Our keystone will be Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, which is arguably the most important work of Black existentialism from this period. Across the semester we will see why existentialism, with its focus on the ambiguities and ambivalences of lived-experi ...
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20-30 minute reflections on particular Spike Lee films, from School Daze up through Black KkKlansman - précis for a book-length study of Lee's cinema, reflections on a course I've taught a number of times at Amherst College and University of Maryland. In these podcast pieces, I pay particular attention to issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality as they emerge inside particular films and in the history-memory of African American life. How does Lee's cinema think? How does sound and image ...
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Teagan, Lisa, and Kayna on Kamau Brathwaite
39:53
39:53
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Discussion of Kamau Brathwaite's poetics and poetic praxis with Teagan, Kayna, and Lisa.By John E. Drabinski
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Kamau Brathwaite - Orality, Aurality, and Postcolonial Intelligence
26:57
26:57
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A discussion of the relation between orality and aurality in Kamau Brathwaite's poetics and poetic praxis.By John E. Drabinski
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Mary Catherine, Twanna, and Christin on Wilson Harris
36:02
36:02
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A discussion of Wilson Harris' work with Mary Catherine Contreras, Twanna Hodge, and Christin Washington.By John E. Drabinski
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Wilson Harris - Creoleness, Identity, and the Imagination
22:12
22:12
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A discussion of two late essays by Wilson Harris on creoleness and the imagination, with particular emphasis on how they ask us to rethink and recalibrate our language of identity.By John E. Drabinski
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Twanna, Abigail, and Charlie on Glissant and Benítez-Rojo
42:48
42:48
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Abigail, Twanna, and Charlie discuss the intersections between the work of Glissant and Benítez-Rojo.By John E. Drabinski
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Édouard Glissant and Antonio Benítez-Rojo - The Archipelago, Chaos, and an Ethics of the Aesthetic
22:52
22:52
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A discussion of Glissant's and Benítez-Rojo's conceptions of the archipelago, chaos, and the implications for an ethic of globalized aesthetics.By John E. Drabinski
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Twanna, Mary Catherine, and Dalton on Glissant and Walcott
45:46
45:46
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A discussion of Glissant's and Walcott's work, specifically the opening pages of Poetics of Relation and the poem "The Sea is History."By John E. Drabinski
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You’re listening to Conversations in Atlantic Theory, a podcast dedicated to books and ideas generated from and about the Atlantic world. In collaboration with the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, these conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theo…
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Autumn Womack on The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial data, 1880-1930
1:02:51
1:02:51
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You’re listening to Conversations in Atlantic Theory, a podcast dedicated to books and ideas generated from and about the Atlantic world. In collaboration with the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, these conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theo…
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Derek Walcott and Édouard Glissant - History, the Sea, and Caribbean Identity
28:32
28:32
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Reflections on Derek Walcott's 1977 poem "The Sea is History" and the opening sections of Édouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation, with emphasis on history and identity in relation to the Middle Passage and its catastrophic loss.By John E. Drabinski
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Kayna, Charlie, and Christin on V.S. Naipaul and Derek Walcott
38:35
38:35
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Kayna, Charlie, and Christin discuss V.S. Naipaul's Middle Passage and two essays by Derek Walcott, "The Muse of History" and "The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory."By John E. Drabinski
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V.S. Naipaul and Derek Walcott - History and Caribbeanness
28:38
28:38
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A discussion of V.S. Naipaul's The Middle Passage (1962) in relation to Derek Walcott's "The Muse of History" (1974) and "The Antilles" (1992), focused on how Naipaul's melancholia structures his imagination of West Indian history and how Walcott's meditations on paternity and fragmentation reconfigures that imagination.…
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Twanna, Dalton, and Abby on Sylvia Wynter, Blackness, and Coloniality
46:39
46:39
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A discussion of two essays by Sylvia Wynter: "Toward the Socigenic Principle" and "Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom"By John E. Drabinski
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Sylvia Wynter - Sociogenesis, Consciousness, and the Human
32:21
32:21
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A discussion of Sylvia Wynter's work and its extension of Fanon's key insights, with particular emphasis on her essays "Toward the Sociogenic Principle" and "Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom."By John E. Drabinski
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Lisa, Abby, and Teagan on Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks
38:46
38:46
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Lisa, Abby, and Teagan discuss the significance and meaning of Frantz Fanon's 1952 book Black Skin, White Masks.By John E. Drabinski
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Frantz Fanon - Antiblackness, Language, and World-Making
28:57
28:57
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A discussion of key themes in Frantz Fanon's 1952 text Black Skin, White Masks, with particular attention to the function of language, sociogeny, and antiblackness in conceiving the possibilities of world-making.By John E. Drabinski
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Charlie, Mary Catherine, and Teagan on René Ménil's Surrealism and Caribbeanness
30:59
30:59
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A discussion of René Ménil's writings on surrealism and Caribbeanness, with particular focus on his essays from the early 1940s in the journal Tropiques.By John E. Drabinski
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René Ménil - Caribbeanness, Decolonization, and Poetry After the Heteronomic
26:10
26:10
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A discussion of René Ménil's essays from Tropiques and their vision of a poetics of Caribbean identity and life.By John E. Drabinski
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Kayna, Christin, and Mary Catherine on Suzanne Césaire's Surrealism
36:26
36:26
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Reflections by Kayna Richards, Christin Washington, and Mary Catherine Contreras on Suzanne Césaire's essay on Surrealism.By John E. Drabinski
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Suzanne Césaire - Surrealism, Civilization, and the Making of a Poetics
33:14
33:14
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An examination of Suzanne Césaire's essays for Tropiques on surrealism and Frobenius' notion of civilization, with particular attention to how those essays establish the conditions for a possible poetics of the post colony.By John E. Drabinski
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Aimé Césaire - Surrealism, Civilization, and Poetry's Possibility
26:29
26:29
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A discussion of Aimé Césaire's 1945 essay "Poetry and Knowledge" and 1956 essay "Culture and Colonization," with particular focus on how the poetic word functions as an anti-colonial intervention.By John E. Drabinski
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Silence and Black Masculinity in The Brother From Another Planet
32:14
32:14
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Discussion of the John Sayles 1984 film The Brother From Another Planet, in particular how the silence of the alien - Brother - allows us to see features of race and gender in American life.By John E. Drabinski
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Mark Deets on A Country of Defiance: Mapping the Casamance in Senegal
1:23:23
1:23:23
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This discussion is with Dr. Mark W. Deets, an Assistant Professor of African and World History and the Director of the Center for American Studies and Research at The American University in Cairo. His research and teaching focus on 19 th and 20th century West African social and cultural history, especially in the Senegambian region. His first book,…
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Marlene Daut on Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution
1:08:42
1:08:42
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Today’s discussion is with Dr. Marlene Daut , she is a Professor of French and African American Studies at Yale University and author of the recently published book Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution. She is series editor of New World Studies at UVA Press, co-editor of Global Black History at Public Books, and ha…
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Eziaku Nwokocha on Vodou en Vogue: Fashioning Black Divinities in Haiti and the United States
1:40:26
1:40:26
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This discussion is with Dr. Eziaku Nwokocha, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Miami. She is a scholar of Africana religions with expertise in the ethnographic study of Vodou in Haiti and the Haitian diaspora. Her research is grounded in gender and sexuality studies, visual and material culture and A…
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Drew Dalton on The Matter of Evil: From Speculative Realism to Ethical Pessimism
1:24:55
1:24:55
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1:24:55
You’re listening to Conversations in Atlantic Theory, a podcast dedicated to books and ideas generated from and about the Atlantic world. In collaboration with the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, these conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theo…
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1
Dash and Gerima on What is an African American
28:19
28:19
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A discussion of Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust and Haile Gerima's Sankofa, centered on the question "What is an African American?" I explore how Dash answers this question by filtering the memory of Africa through the "American" part of African American, but Gerima inverts this prerogative and understands the "American" to be a sign of alienati…
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Home and the Postcolonial State in Jean Marie Teno's Clando
30:12
30:12
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A discussion of Jean Marie Teno's 1996 film Clando, with particular focus on how the degeneration of the postcolonial state transforms a sense of home, nation, land, and embodiment.By John E. Drabinski
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Gender, Colonialism, and the Everyday in Sambizanga
24:02
24:02
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A discussion of Sarah Maldoror's film Sambizanga (1972) and how it entwines reflections on gender, colonialism, and the everyday. As well, I discuss Maldoror's commitment to making a film infused with mourning and beauty both, which does not compromise the politics of the film but instead, in the aesthetic dimension, teaches a moral lesson about th…
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Memory of Colonialism in Zulu and Battle of Algiers
34:29
34:29
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A discussion of the pairing of Zulu and Battle of Algiers, with particular focus on how each films forms a memory of colonialism. What was the meaning of colonialism? What did it reveal about the colonizer? And who were the colonized, both in the moment of domination and in the moment of revolutionary struggle? I note how defense of the feminine - …
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Colonialism and its Aftermath in La noire de... and Mandabi
30:18
30:18
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A discussion of the function of colonialism as a political-psychological and economic presence in the postcolonial nation. With emphasis on how relationships to France wreak death and destruction in the postcolony, I explore how Ousmane Sembène tells a political story through intimate portraits of a young woman seeking adventure (La noire de...) an…
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Crisis and Dimensionality in Hollywood Shuffle
27:06
27:06
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27:06
Short discussion of Robert Townsend's 1987 film Hollywood Shuffle, with particular attention to how the film poses critical questions to putting Black bodies, Black people, and Black life on the screen. I also talk about how the resonance of Hollywood Shuffle might tell us as much about our own consumption patters as it does about the reality of ci…
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Isaac Vincent Joslin on Afrofuturisms: Ecology, Humanity, and Francophone Cultural Expressions
1:15:59
1:15:59
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This discussion is with Dr. Isaac Joslin who holds a PhD from the University of Minnesota in Francophone Studies. Currently Assistant Professor of Francophone Studies and Global Futures Scholar at Arizona State University, he has travelled extensively for research in Francophone Africa in Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Cameroon, Togo, Burkina Faso, Rwanda…
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Jenkins on Masculinity, Touch, and Vulnerability
22:38
22:38
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A discussion of Barry Jenkins' 2016 film Moonlight, with particular focus on the question of masculinity and race. How do touch, vulnerability, and beauty change the way we think about masculine identification? What does it mean to put this vision of masculinity in conversation with Richard Wright's rendering of re-masculation as violence, dominati…
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Wright on Guns, Masculinity, and Violence
21:56
21:56
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A treatment of Richard Wright's short story "The Man Who Was Almost A Man," which examines the place of violence, guns, and respect in radicalized formations of masculinity. How does the main character Dave Saunders reimagine his masculinity in a world of emasculation? And how does the gun function as a phallic symbol that is indispensable for imag…
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Wright on Antiblackness, Guilt, and Death in Native Son
22:01
22:01
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A discussion of the 1951 film adaptation of Richard Wright's novel Native Son. I am particularly interested in the theme of race and guilt, a theme that is consistent across Wright's work and illuminates his existential themes of condemnation to death and the sociological construction of racial identity in the social relation.…
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Wright on Visibility, Death, and the Possibility of Black Life
19:56
19:56
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A discussion of Richard Wright's short story "The Man Who Lived Underground," which explores themes of visibility, invisibility, life, freedom, and death. In this process piece, I think through the meaning of the underground as invisibility and freedom - with reference to Ralph Ellison's treatment of invisibility in Invisible Man - and the above gr…
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Burnett on Despair, Abandonment, and Pessimism in Killer of Sheep
20:47
20:47
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A discussion of Charles Burnett's 1978 film Killer of Sheep, with particular focus on the nihilistic, despairing pessimism of the film. Stan, the main character, has been worn down into an affectless figure whose sense of joy and human contact is all but eliminated. What space is there for joy and pleasure? Is escape possible? Is another sense of s…
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Davis on Negation, Liberation, and Formation of Self
19:45
19:45
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A discussion of Angela Davis' essay "Lecture on Liberation," which examines the structure of self and collective liberation. In particular, I am interested here in how she takes Frederick Douglass' description of his fight with Covey as exemplary of the structure of negation, a structure that tells a story about how to retrieve a sense of authentic…
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Wynter and Quijano on Politics, Coloniality, and the Human
55:20
55:20
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A discussion of Sylvia Wynter's essay "Toward the Sociogenic Principle" and Aníbal Quijano's "Coloniality of Power" essay, with particular attention to how each diagnoses the pathologies of the colonial relation, the world is buoys, and the kinds of racial and national identities it produces. How can we think outside the coloniality of power? How c…
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A discussion of Derek Walcott's 1974 essay "The Muse of History," focusing on how his repudiation of "paternity" impacts the question of identity in the black Americas. What is a black American? What is that identity's relationship to European and African ancestry, and the overwhelming frame of empire's history? What other identity stories can be t…
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Glissant on Difference, Opacity, Traces, and Creolization
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A conversation about Édouard Glissant's work on creolization, with particular emphasis on how that conceptualization of relation emphasizes both the right to opacity and the necessity of cultural contact. What happens to concepts, to art, to expressive life when it is put in contact with differences? How do vulnerable communities and traditions pro…
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Celan, Levinas, and Derrida on Representation and the Unrepresentable
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44:04
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A discussion of Paul Celan's essay "The Meridian," along with companion pieces of Emmanuel Levinas. Claude Lanzmann, and Jacques Derrida, with particular focus on the poetic word's capacity to bring the deconstructive, dismantling, and interruptive function of absence in reckoning with traumatic experience. How does such a word reflect an ethics of…
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Spillers on Gender, Race, Naming, and Possibility
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59:20
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A discussion of Hortense Spillers' essay "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," with particular emphasis on the critical possibilities opened up by her interrogation of naming, gender, and race after The Moynihan Report. What does the Report tell us about the status of the phrase "Black woman"? And what remains to be thought after w…
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Ellison on Sound, Invisibility, and World-Making
19:17
19:17
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A discussion of the Prologue to Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel Invisible Man, with particular interest in his treatment of Louis Armstrong's song "Black and Blue" and its resonance across the Prologue, as well as the larger relation of the song and its sonic strategies to ideas of poetry, poiesis, and world-making.…
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Hurston on Black Expressive Life and World-Making
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20:28
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A comment on Zora Neale Hurston's essay "Characteristics of Negro Expression," with particular emphasis on how those characteristics - angularity, adornment - capture forms of resistance and world-making in an anti-black world. How does expressive life embody a sense of living in its fullest sense, rather than simply surviving regimes of white supr…
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Lamming on Writing, Race, and the Human Condition
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15:46
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A treatment of George Lamming's 1956 essay "The Negro Writer and His World," with particular emphasis on the task of the colonized writer in creating a literary and readerly tradition, as well as the phases the writer moves through, from the singularity of the call of writing to the social relation of the writer to the highest form of literary comp…
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Sartre on Blackness, Liberation, and Dialectics
18:43
18:43
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A discussion of Jean-Paul Sartre's introductory piece to a collection of Négritude poetry. The essay "Black Orpheus" describes the revolutionary power of Black consciousness and its capacity to transform how we understand collective identity. However, Sartre concludes the essay by calling for an eventual surpassing of that consciousness and movemen…
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Césaire on Diaspora, Culture, and Colonization
22:02
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A discussion of Aimé Césaire's 1956 essay "Culture and Colonization," with specific emphasis on the distinction between culture and civilization, and how that distinction generates his conception of diaspora.By John E. Drabinski
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Kristeva on Abjection, Misogyny, and the Symbolic-Political Order
1:01:29
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Long discussion of Julia Kristeva's The Powers of Horror, with special attention to how her theory of abjection informs political strategies of oppression and exploitation rooted in the body. Our discussion works through the conception of the abject and its relation to misogyny and patriarchal cultural formation and reproduction, with particular at…
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