Black Narratives of Living: a roundtable conversation

How do we think and talk about black narratives of living, and being? What happens if we think of black and queer narratives and/in the constancy of their interanimation not only as a disruption of official or “master” narratives, but also as an ongoing refusal of individuation, which has often sought to deploy narrative on its “own” behalf? In thinking through such narratives, might we consider that the question of what is refused is, in part, the grand narrative of Geist? Can we describe a poetics of black narratives of living, and how do they constitute a practice that incorporates and resists theorization?

Panelists include:

R. A. Judy is author of (Dis)forming the American Canon: The Vernacular of African Arabic American Slave Narrative, “The Question of Nigga Authenticity,” “The New Black Aesthetic and W.E.B. Du Bois, or Hephaestus, Limping,” “Kant and the Negro,” “Fanon’s Body of Black Experience,” and editor of Sociology Hesitant: W. E. B. Du Bois’ Dynamic Thinking. He lives in Pittsburgh and New York City, and is Professor of Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh.

John Keene is the author of the novel Annotations (New Directions); the short fiction collection Counternarratives (New Directions), which received a 2016 American Book Award; the art-text collection Seismosis (1913 Press) with artist Christopher Stackhouse; the art-text collaboration with photographer Nicholas Muellner, GRIND (ITI Press); and, most recently, the chapbook Playland (Seven Kitchens Press).  He has also published a translation of Brazilian author Hilda Hilst’s novel Letters from a Seducer (Nightboat Books / A Bolha Editora). A longtime member of the Dark Room Writers Collective and a graduate fellow of Cave Canem, he serves as chair of African American and African Studies and teaches English and creative writing at Rutgers University-Newark.

Fred Moten is author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, Hughson’s Tavern, B. Jenkins, The Feel Trio, The Little Edges, The Service Porch and co-author, with Stefano Harney, of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study and, with Wu Tsang, of Who touched me?He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the University of California, Riverside.

Moderated by:

Sadia Abbas is the author of At Freedom’s Limit: Islam and the Postcolonial Predicament,published by Fordham University Press, and winner of the MLA 2014 First Book Prize.  She is an Associate Professor in the Center for Migration and the Global City, the Department of English, and the Program in Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University.

Gayatri Gopinath is an associate professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and director of Asian/Pacific/American Studies at New York University. Gopinath is the author of Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Duke University Press).