This panel gathers writers, scholars, and organizers in memory of bell hooks (1952-2021). We will speak to the far-reaching legacy she has left to those who strive to counteract the “politics of power” in the classroom and on the page. Panelists will address hooks’s critique of contemporary masculinity and racial representation, her expansive theories of “multicultural education,” the sound of Black geology in her dirges and mountain songs, and her wide-ranging, ongoing preoccupation with love in its many forms. This will be an opportunity for panelists and participants alike to discuss not only how we teach, read, and write about hooks’s work, but also how education can be a “practice of freedom” in the twenty-first century.
The event is a part of Pomona College’s Thinking Its Presence: Racial Vertigo, BlackBrown Feelings, and Significantly Problematic Objects, an interdisciplinary conference on race, creative writing, and artistic and aesthetic practices that runs from March 30-April 2, 2023. Visit the conference site for registration costs and more information. (Image art by Vi Khi Nao)
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Moderator
Abby Munson
Panelists
Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe is a Black British interdisciplinary artist, writer, DJ, and professor who grew up between the UK and New York. She specializes in colonial histories of race, debt, and technology. She makes videos, sound sculptures, and installations that foreground digital tools as a way of critiquing overlapping European colonialisms and creating sonic kinship through technologies. Tao is writing two books. The first, BLACK CAPITAL, CHINESE DEBT explores African and Asian diasporic intellectual histories and political life from the nineteenth century to the present through Caribbean cuisine, soundsystems, photography, and gambling practices. The second, AFTER EDEN explores islands and how the climate crisis is a racial crisis. She is a member of NEW INC, an art and tech incubator led by the New Museum in New York City. Tao is also the Executive Director of Afro-Asia Group, an organization that centers the intersections of African and Asian diasporas, futurity, and coalition-building. She is an assistant professor of Black studies, gender, and sexuality at Cornell University. Her most recent work Queen Nannies is currently on display at the Institute of Jamaica.
Jess Row is the author of the novel Your Face in Mine (2014) and two collections of short stories, Nobody Ever Gets Lost (2011) and The Train to Lo Wu (2005). His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Granta, Tin House, and many other venues, and he's a frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, and Boston Review. He's received a Whiting Writers Award and an NEA Fellowship, and is a Guggenheim Fellow for 2017-18. He is currently working on a collection of essays about race and the American imagination, White Flights, to be published by Graywolf in 2019. An associate professor of English at the College of New Jersey, he was a founding faculty member of the short-lived (and much mourned) City University of Hong Kong MFA program (2011-2016), and most recently was a visiting professor at NYU.
Sonya Posmentier is an associate professor in the Department of English, where she teaches African American and Black Diasporic literature and culture, poetry and poetics, and environmental literature. Her first book Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature was published in 2017 by Johns Hopkins University Press, and is a recipient of the William Sanders Scarborough award from the Modern Language Association. She is at work on a new book, Black Reading, about the intersecting histories of black cultural studies and modern lyric theory. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, American Literature, American Literary History, Public Books and elsewhere.
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