Insurgent Black Feminist Poetics: An Authors Session

Session Submission Type: Experimental Session

Abstract

This panel gathers the authors of six new books in Black feminist studies of literature and film to discuss the relationship between Black radicalism and Black feminist aesthetics. Beginning with the assumption that contemporary Black feminist writing is a field through which to approach the questions of being, liberation, and materiality that have animated Black literary studies and American studies more generally, we study and discuss writers, musicians, and filmmakers such as Gayl Jones, Gwendolyn Brooks, Suzan Lori-Parks, Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, Missy Elliott, and Kathleen Collins. The session will be structured as an author-meets-critic round robin, in which each participant will respond to one of their fellow participant's book in short (5-10 minute) talks. To establish coherence and to emphasize some of the common themes, our respondent will offer comments (also 5-10 minutes) to close the session.

We will discuss the following books:

Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life by Sarah Jane Cervenak (Duke UP 2021)
The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of U.S. Empire by Erica Edwards (NYU Press 2021)
Black Aliveness, or a Poetics of Being by Kevin Quashie (Duke UP 2021)
The Afterlives of Kathleen Collins: A Black Woman Filmmaker's Search for New Life by L.H. Stallings (Indiana UP 2021)
The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan (University of Illinois Press 2021)
The Sisterhood: Black Women's Literary Organizing by Courtney Thorsson (Columbia University Press, forthcoming)

Responding to the CFP's call to study the "multisensory engagement with the world as it is and as we want it to be," this panel centers radical Black feminist literature and culture in the multisensory study of Black possibility.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Kara Keeling, University of Southern California

Panelists

• Sarah J Cervenak, Unc Greensboro

• Erica R Edwards, Yale University

• Kevin Quashie, Brown University

• Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Georgetown University

• LaMonda Horton-Stallings, Georgetown University

• Courtney Thorsson, University of Oregon

Comment

• GerShun Avilez, University of Maryland-College Park