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10:00 GerShun Avilez (UNC, Chapel Hill):
“Writing Queer History: Kinship and Biopolitics in Tarrell Alvin McCraney’s
Cycle”
This paper studies the writing of queer history by examining McCraney's dramatic trilogy The Brother/Sister Plays (2010). These plays investigate how one might write about the lives of queers of color and showcase methods sensitive to the silences of the queer archive and the complexities of queer existence, especially in the U.S. South. McCraney's plays build on Samuel Delaney’s novels and Cheryl Dunye’s films to explore how homophobia serves as a biopolitical mechanism in the plays' presentations of kinship. The play-cycle invites the challenges of recording a history of queer lived experience, even in the realm of art.
11:00 Yogita Goyal (UCLA):
“We Need New Diasporas: Contemporary African Literature and the Problem of the Global”
This paper explains how recent fiction from the new African diaspora— celebrated novels by Chris Abani, NoViolet Bulawayo, and Teju Cole— reframes charged questions of race, class, and migration. In doing so, this fiction conceives of diaspora beyond the assimilation mandated by the conventional immigrant plot or critical nostalgia for simpler moments of opposition between Africa and the West. Refusing to accept US hegemony or a diaspora framed solely by memories of slavery, these writers deploy newly ascendant concepts like the Afropolitan and debates about poverty porn to highlight more expansive, sometimes fractured understandings of transnational black culture. Their novels show how the history of the postcolonial state, and its own itineraries of hope and despair, migration, and return, transforms American conceptions of race.
2:00 Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman (Brandeis):
“Black Grotesquerie”
This paper analyzes the grotesque as a strategic mode of signification characterized by structural ambiguity it simultaneously creates.
Adducing Mikhail Bakhtin’s conception of the grotesque as that which undermines the prevailing social order by confounding its representational logics, it shows how new millennial black writers deploy the aesthetics of grotesquerie—techniques of formal and figural contortion, substitution, inversion, and corruption— to revalue historically debased subjectivities and to imagine new sociopolitical and racial arrangements, even as they register the impossibility of fully capturing black experience, whether in historical time or post-racial futurity.
3:00 Anthony Reed (Yale):
"Anarchic Regard: Amiri Baraka's Phonographic Poetry
This paper investigates Amiri Baraka's relationship to free jazz by analyzing his recorded collaborations with musicians throughout his career.
Those collaborations, I argue, force us to recast those accounts that see music as a stable body of texts or a stand-in for an ontologically rooted blackness. Instead, like Baraka’s early poetry, these collaborations compel attention to the interior geographies of black sound, where music and poetry alike signal engaged listening and thought. The end of the talk will raise the question of listening to and reading Baraka in the era of #BlackLivesMatter. One question governing these paired considerations is what it means that critics have now returned to the Black
Arts Movement, which version is allowed to circulate, and what value or resonance might it have for rethinking black aesthetics and politics in the present. Ultimately, I will argue that attending to the different—even competing—modes of abstraction between Baraka and his collaborators points to different concepts of tradition, abstraction, and blackness that, read together, provide a different sense of the Black
Arts era and its afterlife.
4:00 Roundtable

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