The Black Studies Project: 50 Years and Counting

 In collaboration with the

Presents

The Black Studies Project: 50 Years and Counting

THE LIONEL TRILLING SEMINAR LECTURE WITH

DR. HORTENSE SPILLERS

Born in the heat of struggle, the Black Studies movement in the United States looks back now at more than fifty years of curricular development and ahead to a hopeful future at least as long. This year’s Trilling Lecture examines the idea of the moment of Black Studies as protest on the streets of America is transformed, virtually overnight, into a curricular object—still controversial nonetheless—that has altered the face of humanistic study in the United States. The outcome is both a cause worthy of celebration and the occasion for a cautionary tale.

Wednesday, October 6, 2021, 6:15pm

For more information about this event and to register please CLICK HERE

The Trilling Lecture will be given by Dr. Hortense Spillers. Hortense J. Spillers is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in English, Emerita, at Vanderbilt University. Since receiving her Ph.D. from Brandeis, she has taught at Wellesley College, Haverford College, Emory, and Cornell Universities. A recipient of numerous honors and awards, among them, grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation, she has been a fellow at both the National Humanities Center, Research Triangle, and the Center for the Study of the Behavioral Sciences, Palo Alto. While at Haverford, she was chair of the English Department for two years before moving to Cornell where she joined the Norton projects by serving as one of the period editors of the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature.

Her collection of scholarly essays, Black, White, and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2003. With Marjorie Pryse, she co-edited Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, published by Indiana University Press; Spillers also edited for the English Institute series a collection of essays entitled Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text, published by Routledge. Some of her more recent essays have appeared in The New Centennial Review, das argument, and boundary 2. She co-founded with Tamura Lomax The Feminist Wire, an online magazine dedicated to feminist issues and critique. Currently, she is at work on two new projects, the idea of black culture and black women and early state formations.

Respondents:

Rich Blint is assistant professor of Literature in the Department of Literary Studies, director of the Program in Race and Ethnicity, and affiliate faculty in Gender Studies at the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School. He is co-editor of a special issue of African American Review on James Baldwin, wrote the introduction and notes for the eBook Baldwin for Our Times: Writings from James Baldwin for a Time of Sorrow and Struggle (Beacon Press), and served as Guest Critic for a special issue of The Brooklyn Rail on James Baldwin. Upcoming books include A Radical Interiority: James Baldwin and the Personified Self in Modern American Culture, and A Queer Spirit: Incidents in the Life of the Americas. He is also co-editor of the forthcoming Cambridge volume African American Literature in Transition, 1980-1990, editor of Approaches to Teaching the Works of James Baldwin, currently under preparation for the Modern Language Association, and editor-at-large for the A-Line: a journal of progressive thought.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is University Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. Her books are Myself Must I Remake (1974), Of Grammatology (1976; translation with critical introduction of Derrida’s De la grammatologie; 2016, new 40th anniversary edition), In Other Worlds (1987), Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), Other Asias (2003), An Aesthetic Education (2013), and Readings (2014). “Can the Subaltern Speak?” has become a worldwide classic. She has won the Kyoto Prize, the Padma Bhushan, and Chevalier des Arts. She has been elected to the American Association of Arts & Sciences and the British Academy. She holds twelve honorary doctorates. She is an obsessive hands-on activist for holistic humanities education, ecology, feminism.