Black Lives and the Legacies of US Imperialism

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

How might our effort to understand the meaning of US imperialism now, at this “late-stage” conjuncture, emerge from confronting the lives of Black people? More precisely, what “critical resources” can we glean from questions about “Black Lives,” e.g., Black biography and the problems of identity which that avenue of inquiry manifests? How do critical interrogations into the “biography” of Black persons—both historical and literary—clarify the stakes and terms of the unfolding crisis?

This proposed session explores these and related questions by engaging the recent scholarly work tied to the Black Lives series published under the auspices of Yale University Press. Black persons indubitably constitute a population that makes uniquely clear the impact of imperialism in the Americas, from its early imbrication with the Atlantic slave trade and the Middle Passage, through (in particular, its US formation) Jim Crow and other rebuttals of Reconstruction, and up to current, “late stage” American formations that affirm the ongoing and structural nature of a virulent racial capitalism. American empire has strived to make its “manifest destiny” legible and authoritative via white rhetorics of individualism, autonomy, and exceptional western-European selves. In contrast, and in no small part due to the histories of displacement, diaspora, and intersection they represent, Black lives showcase the multiplicity and contingency of identity. Black lives shift attention from fantasies about supreme white selves to the violence and inhumanity masked by American ideologies of white national selfhood.

The moment is opportune for a reflection on the significance of the Yale Black Lives series. While the white backlash to the BLM movement stemmed the summer 2020 tide of mass rebellion, now, more than ever, do Black Lives Matter.

This panel blends new work by an emerging scholar with the expertise of well-established academics. Each presenter employs new vocabularies to conceptualize “Black Lives” in all their complexity and difficulty. The first presenter, Zaborowska, tracks Baldwin’s conceptualization of his own “life in fragments” and how his a-chronological, auto-thematic storytelling undergirds his reworking of the postmodern politics of multiplicity both in his still-influential writings and his underappreciated late works like Just above My Head (1979). The second presenter, former ASA president and ASA life-time achievement award-winner Fisher Fishkin, asks whether understanding Twain’s character Jim as a canny and self-conscious literary figure on a quest for liberation can be a Trojan horse enabling an end run around those who would ban the nation’s history of systemic racism form our classrooms. The third presenter, Harris, demonstrates how Richard Wright and Octavia Butler map a program of compassionate action for healing national divisions and expose the dire consequences for a US that refuses such a project. The fourth presenter, former ASA president Washington, interrogates Paule Marshall’s precocious delineation of a transnational Black fiction that is enjoying broad legibility only now, in the post–black aesthetics of the current late imperial 21st-century moment. Respondent Hatton will put many facets of “Black Lives” put forth by panelists into conversation with John Edgar Wideman's new genre-defying work, Slave Road.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• “I Am Not Your Negro Modernist: James Baldwin and the Languages of Black Queer Humanism” - Magdalena J Zaborowska, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

• Re-envisioning Jim - Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Stanford University

• Outside the Door and Holding the Key: African American Writers and the Salvation of America - TRUDIER HARRIS, University of Alabama

• Paule Marshall and Black Post-Blackness - Mary-Helen Washington, University of Maryland-College Park

Chair

• Kathy Lavezzo, University of Iowa

Comment

• Nigel Hatton, University of California-Merced

Biographical Information

Chair: Dr. Kathy Lavezzo teaches English at the University of Iowa. She is the editor of Imagining a Medieval English Nation (Minnesota, 2004) and author of Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature and English Community (Cornell, 2006), The Accommodated Jew: English Antisemitism from Bede to Milton (Cornell, 2018) and Bad Medievalism and the Modernity Problem (Fordham, October 2025). Her current project, The Hobbit and the Critic, uses the strange intersection of Stuart Hall and J.R.R Tolkien (who dissuaded Hall from becoming a medievalist) to rethink post-war culture and society.

First Presenter: Dr. Magdalena J. Zaborowska is Professor of Afroamerican and American Studies in the Departments of American Culture and Afroamerican and African Studies, University of Michigan- Ann Arbor. She’s currently serving as Chair of the Department of American Culture. Previously at the University of Oregon, Furman University, Tulane University, Aarhus University in Denmark; Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Italy in Cagliari (Sardinia) and Université Paul-Valéry in Montpellier, France. Her research concerns interdisciplinary literary and cultural studies approaches to humanistic representations of narrative and social space and how various conceptions, definitions, and representations of identity aspects – e.g., race, gender, nationality, sexuality, region, and class – have been inflected by their transatlantic histories and embodied, material consequences. Her single-authored books are Me and My House: James Baldwin’s Last Decade in France (Duke UP, 2018), the MLA award-winning: James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile (Duke UP 2009) How We Found America: Reading Gender through East European Immigrant Narratives (University of North Carolina Press, 1995; Eminent Editions), and James Baldwin: The Life Album (Yale UP, Black Lives, 2025). Her edited and co-edited works are Other Americans, Other Americas: The Politics and Poetics of Multiculturalism (Aarhus University Press, 1998), The Puritan Origins of American Sex: Religion, Sexuality, and National Identity in American Literature (Routledge, 2001), and Over the Wall/After the Fall: Post-Communist Cultures in the East-West Gaze (Indiana University Press, 2004). She is the creator of an open-access digital writer’s house-museum collection at the University of Michigan, and an online exhibit devoted to Baldwin’s house in France at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC)/Smithsonian in Washington D.C.. She has appeared on numerous media interviews and podcasts. Her current monograph-in-progress, Memory Wars: Museums, Race, and the New Borderlands, explores interactive exhibitions and anti-racist and anti-nationalist storytelling strategies in the United States and post-Cold War Eastern Europe.

Second Presenter: Dr. Shelley Fisher Fishkin is the Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities, Professor of English, and (by courtesy) Professor of African and African American Studies at Stanford University, where she directed the American Studies Program for 21 years. Fishkin, who holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale, is the award-winning author, editor or co-editor of 50 books, most recently, Jim: Huckleberry Finn’s Comrade, published in April 2025 in Yale’s “Black Lives” biography series (edited by David Blight, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Jaqueline Goldsby). Other books include Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices; The 29-volume Oxford Mark Twain; the Encyclopedia of Civil Rights in America; Writing America: Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee; and The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental Railroad. She is past president of the American Studies Association, and a co-founder of the Journal of Transnational American Studies. She was awarded the Carl Bode-Norman Holmes Pearson Prize for Lifetime Achievement and Outstanding Contribution to American Studies from the American Studies Association, and the Olivia Langdon Clemens Award for Scholarly Innovation and Creativity by the Mark Twain Circle of America. In 2019, the American Studies Association created the Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize for International Scholarship in Transnational American Studies to honor her “outstanding dedication to the field.”

Third Presenter: Dr. Trudier Harris earned a B.A. from Stillman College (1969) and an M.A. (1972) and Ph.D. (1973) from The Ohio State University, Columbus, before holding positions at The College of William & Mary, Emory University, UNC Chapel Hill, and the University of Alabama. She is University Distinguished Research Professor of English Emerita, University of Alabama, and J. Carlyle Sitterson Distinguished Professor of English Emerita, UNC Chapel Hill, where she taught courses in African American literature and folklore. Her published books include From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature (1982), Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (1984), Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison (1991), The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller’s Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan (1996), The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South (2009), Martin Luther King Jr., Heroism, and African American Literature (2014), Depictions of Home in African American Literature (2021), Bigger: A Literary Life (2024), and a memoir, Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the South (2003). In 2002, she received the Eugene Current-Garcia Award for selection as Alabama’s Distinguished Literary Scholar. Stillman College bestowed an honorary doctorate degree upon her in 2010. UNC Chapel Hill created the “Trudier Harris Distinguished Professorship” in her honor in 2014. In 2018, she received an honorary doctorate degree from The College of William & Mary, the Richard Beale Davis Award for Lifetime Achievement in Southern Literary Studies, and a Resident Fellowship to the National Humanities Center. Harris received the 2018 Clarence E. Cason Award for Nonfiction Writing from the College of Communication & Information Sciences at the University of Alabama. She also won the 2018 SEC Faculty Achievement Award at the University of Alabama (“Professor of the Year”). Throughout her career, Harris has traveled and lectured throughout the United States and the world, having visited 46 states and 21 countries. On 10 March 2023, Harris was inducted into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame, where she joins the likes of Truman Capote, Zora Neale Hurston, Harper Lee, Sonia Sanchez, and Margaret Walker.

Fourth Presenter: Dr. Mary Helen Washington is Distinguished University Professor Emerita in the English Department at the University of Maryland, College Park, specializing in 20th and 21st century African American literature. Her monograph, The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s (Columbia University Press, 2014) received Honorable Mention in the William Sanders Scarborough Prize competition from The Modern Language Association. She has edited three groundbreaking collections of African American literature: Memory of Kin: Stories About Family by Black Writers (Random House, February 1991); Black-Eyed Susans and Midnight Birds: Stories By and About Black Women (reprinted Doubleday/Anchor, January 1990); and Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860-1960, (Doubleday/Anchor, September 1987). She has contributed to several PBS documentary series, including Eyes on the Prize, The American Experience, Literary Visions, and Sighted Eyes, Feeling Heart; she also has appeared as an expert commentator on C-SPAN. From 1976-1980, she was the Director of Black Studies at the University of Detroit. From 1980 to 1990, she taught at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. She was a Bunting Fellow at Harvard University (1979-80). She wrote an oft-cited afterword to the 1981 Feminist Press reissue of Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones and she is currently organizing Marshall’s papers as well as completing Paule — Like A Man: A Biography of Paule Marshall, which will be published by Yale University Press. She was president of The American Studies Association from 1996-1997 and was awarded the American Studies Association’s Carl Bode-Norman Holmes Pearson Prize for lifetime achievement in 2015.

Respondent: Dr. Nigel Hatton is associate professor of literature and philosophy in the Department of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures at the University of California, Merced, and adjunct lecturer in the Narrative Medicine Program at Columbia University. He is a co-author of the book Departures: An Introduction to Refugee Studies (University of California Press, 2022) and has written articles on topics such as literature, philosophy and human rights for The James Baldwin Review, Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice, A-Line: A Journal of Progressive Thought, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, and other publications. His graduate and undergraduate teaching has included courses such as “Human Rights & Literature,” “World Literature,” Literature & Philosophy,” “Cosmopolitanisms,” “Existentialism,” “Captivated Thinking,” “Introduction to African American Literature & Culture,” “From Decolonial Studies to Postcolonial Studies,” “Modernity,” “Readings in Close Reading,” and “Race and Transnational Human Rights.” In the Narrative Medicine Program at Columbia, he has taught or co-taught “Close Reading: Giving and Receiving Accounts of Self,” “Death and Dying,” and “Narrative Medicine and Incarceration.” He has been a senior guest researcher at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Center in Copenhagen, Denmark, a visiting professional at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, and a fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. Since 2003 he has volunteered as a tutor, instructor, and facilitator in California prisons (San Quentin, Sierra Conservation Center, Central California Women’s Facility) and serves on the Faculty Committee for Mt. Tamalpais College, the nation’s first independent liberal arts institution dedicated specifically to serving incarcerated students. He is a founding member of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective, and serves on the respective steering committees of the Søren Kierkegaard Unit and the Moral Injury Unit within the American Academy of Religion. He received the dual Ph.D. in Modern Thought & Literature and the Humanities, with a minor in Political Theory, from Stanford University, the Master of Journalism and Master Arts in Latin American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, the Master of Fine Arts in Writing from the Jesuit University of San Francisco, and the Bachelor of Arts Degree in English from Virginia Tech.