Monday, March 6, 4 p.m., Stern Lounge, (Austin 217):
Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman, "The Black Ecstatic."
"Recognizing the ways in which loss gives rise to new forms of capacitation, political agency, and pleasure, this talk theorizes Black Ecstasy as a queer modality of expression that discovers in rupture an undocumented space of freedom. Attending to structural ambiguity in contemporary black queer writing, I advance Black Ecstasy as an affective, experiential, and expressive strategy that eschews both the heroic death of black masculinist pasts and the survivalist ethic of black feminist futures in order embrace everyday ruin as a pleasurable reckoning with black life in the catastrophic present."
Abdur-Rahman is associate professor of African and Afro-American Studies, English & Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University.
For more information, contact: George Moore, Department of English at george.p.moore@uconn.edu