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GerShun Avilez

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Associate Dean for Academic Affairs: Graduate Education and Strategic Initiatives, College of Arts and Humanities
Professor, English
Associate Dean, Douglass Center

301-405-3803

Francis Scott Key Hall 1102
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Research Expertise

African American/African Diaspora
American
LGBTQ Studies

GerShun Avilez is a cultural studies scholar who specializes in contemporary African American and Black Diasporic literatures and visual cultures. His teaching also covers 20th century US literature. Much of his scholarship explores how questions of gender and sexuality inform artistic production. In addition, he works in the fields of political radicalism, spatial theory, gender studies, and medical humanities. He serves as the Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for the College of Arts and Humanities.

His first book, Radical Aesthetics & Modern Black Nationalism (Illinois), appeared in 2016 as a part of “The New Black Studies” Series. Radical Aesthetics won the 2017 William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association (MLA). The prize is given to an outstanding scholarly study of African American literature or culture. His second book, Black Queer Freedom (Illinois), explores Black Diasporic queer artists and questions of social space. It was published in 2020 and is also a volume in “The New Black Studies” Series. Black Queer Freedom was a finalist for the 2021 P. Sterling Stuckey Book Prize (Association for the Study of Worldwide African Diaspora). He edited a special issue of the journal Women's Studies (2019) and recently co-edited the 10th edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1945-Present (2022).

He is currently working on two research projects, one which focuses on art and healthcare and another which explores Black queer history. He has written articles and book chapters on a range of historical and cultural subjects, including the Cold War, segregation narratives, early African American writing, race & terror, social death, queer life, experimental poetry, Black women’s writing, literary & cinematic satire, the Harlem Renaissance, Black Power Politics, and the Black Arts Movement.

Throughout his work and teaching, he is committed to studying a wide variety of art forms, including, drama, fiction, non-fiction, film, poetry, visual and performance art, ethnography, and comic books/graphic novels. He was the recipient of the Poorvu Award for Excellence in Interdisciplinary Teaching in 2011 (Yale University).

He created and coordinates the departmental Africana/Black Studies Colloquium, which hosts a number of events (lectures, roundtables, book launches, discussion groups, etc.) each year centered around African American and Black Diasporic research. He was an elected member of the MLA Delegate Assembly, and he served on the Program Committee for the annual convention of the American Studies Association (ASA).

He received his PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania, where he also earned a Graduate Certificate in Africana Studies. He has held professorships at Yale University and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.  He also held the Frederick Douglass Post-doctoral Fellowship at the University of Rochester.

GerShun Avilez's website.

 

Awards & Grants

William Sanders Scarborough Prize for an Outstanding Scholarly Study of Black American Literature or Culture

Awarded for Radical Aesthetics & Modern Black Nationalism

English

Author/Lead: GerShun Avilez
Dates:
For an outstanding scholarly study of black American literature or culture.

Publications

"Black Nationalism" in The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth Century Literature & Politics

Black nationalism has featured prominently in twentieth-century African-American social and political thought and refers to a set of ideologies that concern the relationship of people of African descent to the US nation state.

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Author/Lead: GerShun Avilez
Dates:

This chapter tracks the emergence of modern Black nationalism in the mid-twentieth century and exposes how it is a discourse concerned with redefining both racial and gender identity. Paying particular attention to the work of Black women writers, the essay illustrates how the interface of literature and politics under the aegis of Black nationalism becomes a space for exploring and disrupting gender ideologies. Gender politics provides a foundation for some articulations of Black nationalism through the hierarchical rhetoric of the ‘promise of protection’, in which women ostensibly trade safety for social power and agency. Through an analysis of Alice Walker’s short story collection In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1973), the essay illuminates the artistic engagement of nationalist thought and showcases the danger and falseness of the promise of protection, showing both the potential and limits of the influential social logic of nationalism.

“Espionage and Paths of Black Radicalism” in African American Literature and Culture in Transition: The 1960s

This chapter provides an assessment of the shifting terrain of 1960s-era political radicalism through an analysis of Sam Greenlee’s novel The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1969/1973).

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Author/Lead: GerShun Avilez
Dates:

It argues that the novel employs and challenges recognizable Civil Rights and Black Power discourses of social change to destabilize institutionalized racism and socio-economic discrimination and to begin to imagine untested paths to resistance. The chapter also considers how Greenlee uses espionage to reconfigure familiar political ideals and modes of leadership and to explore how the imagined integration of the CIA becomes a device for critiquing employment discrimination and the state’s half-hearted deployment of affirmative action. It closes by showing how spy training and spycraft offer Greenlee opportunities to rethink the connections among gender, sexuality, and revolution, while additionally illustrating how heterosexual masculinity dominates the space of the revolutionary. Through the frame of espionage, Greenlee reimagines Black identity and activism.

Black Queer Freedom: Spaces of Injury and Paths of Desire

Mapping a geography of black queer life through art

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Author/Lead: GerShun Avilez
Dates:
Avilez book cover

Whether engaged in same-sex desire or gender nonconformity, black queer individuals live with being perceived as a threat while simultaneously being subjected to the threat of physical, psychological, and socioeconomic injury. Attending to and challenging threats has become a defining element in queer black artists’ work throughout the black diaspora. GerShun Avilez analyzes the work of diasporic artists who, denied government protections, have used art to create spaces for justice. He first focuses on how the state seeks to inhibit the movement of black queer bodies through public spaces, whether on the street or across borders. From there, he pivots to institutional spaces--specifically prisons and hospitals--and the ways such places seek to expose queer bodies in order to control them. Throughout, he reveals how desire and art open routes to black queer freedom when policy, the law, racism, and homophobia threaten physical safety, civil rights, and social mobility.

Learn more about Black Queer Freedom.

"Vanishing Acts: Civil Rights Reform and Dramatic Inversion in Douglas T. Ward's Day of Absence"

Laws are passed in a crisis mood after a Birmingham or Selma, but no substantial fervor survives the formal signing of legislation.

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Author/Lead: GerShun Avilez
Dates:

Martin Luther King Jr.’s assessment of the incomplete nature of civil rights, even in the midst of historic legislative change, resonates with experiments in African American literary and performance culture of the 1960s.

Read "Vanishing Acts: Civil Rights Reform and Dramatic Inversion in Douglas T. Ward's Day of Absence."

“Scenes of Vulnerability: Desire, Historical Secrecy, and Black Queer Experience in Tarell McCraney’s Marcus”

From The Expressive Art of Tarell McCraney. Ed. David Román, Sharrell Luckett, and Isaiah Wooden.

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Author/Lead: GerShun Avilez
Dates:
Forthcoming June 2020

“Queering the Black Arts Movement”

In 1970 Black Panther leader Huey Newton published a letter in The Black Panther newspaper about women’s liberation and gay liberation.

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Author/Lead: GerShun Avilez
Dates:

Newton s statement made one year after Stonewall and the same month Newton was released from prison takes the unorthodox step of suggesting the importance of black radical organizations and collectives.

Read More about “Queering the Black Arts Movement”

“Amiri Baraka.”

Amiri Baraka (b. 1934–d. 2014) was born Everett LeRoy Jones in Newark, New Jersey.

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Author/Lead: GerShun Avilez
Dates:
After the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, he left Greenwich Village and moved to Harlem to take up the work Malcolm had begun. Rejecting his bohemian past, he committed himself to black nationalism and founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre­School to radicalize the poor through art.

Read More about “Amiri Baraka.”

Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism

Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism explores the long-overlooked links between black nationalist activism and the renaissance of artistic experimentation emerging from recent African American literature, visual art, and film.

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Author/Lead: GerShun Avilez
Dates:

GerShun Avilez charts a new genealogy of contemporary African American artistic production that illuminates how questions of gender and sexuality guided artistic experimentation in the Black Arts Movement from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. As Avilez shows, the artistic production of the Black Arts era provides a set of critical methodologies and paradigms rooted in the disidentification with black nationalist discourses. Avilez's close readings study how this emerging subjectivity, termed aesthetic radicalism, critiqued nationalist rhetoric in the past. It also continues to offer novel means for expressing black intimacy and embodiment via experimental works of art and innovative artistic methods.

Read More about Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism

"Staging Social Death: Alienation and Embodiment in Aishah Rahman's Unfinished Women"

Featured in The Psychic Hold of Slavery: Legacies in American Culture.

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Author/Lead: GerShun Avilez
Dates:
What would it mean to “get over slavery”? Is such a thing possible? Is it even desirable? Should we perceive the psychic hold of slavery as a set of mental manacles that hold us back from imagining a postracist America?

Read More about "Staging Social Death: Alienation and Embodiment in Aishah Rahman's Unfinished Women"

"The Black Arts Movement"

Featured in The Cambridge Companion to Literature of American Civil Rights.

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Author/Lead: GerShun Avilez
Dates:
The Cambridge Companion to American Civil Rights Literature brings together leading scholars to examine the significant traditions, genres, and themes of civil rights literature. While civil rights scholarship has typically focused on documentary rather than creative writing, and political rather than cultural history, this Companion addresses the gap and provides university students with a vast introduction to an impressive range of authors.

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“African American Writing Until 1930.”

Featured in The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature.

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Author/Lead: GerShun Avilez
Dates:
The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature presents a global history of the field and is an unprecedented summation of critical knowledge on gay and lesbian literature that also addresses the impact of gay and lesbian literature on cognate fields such as comparative literature and postcolonial studies.

"The Aesthetics of Terror: Constructing 'Felt Threat in Those Bones Are Not My Child and Leaving Atlanta."

Featured in Obsidian: Literature of the African Diaspora. Special Issue: Violence & Black Youth in Post-Civil Rights U.S.

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Author/Lead: GerShun Avilez
Dates:
Avilez analyzes the suspenseful novel portraying a community–and a family–under siege, during the shocking string of murders of black children in Atlanta in the early 1980s.

Read More about "The Aesthetics of Terror: Constructing 'Felt Threat in Those Bones Are Not My Child and Leaving Atlanta."

"Queer Forms, Black Lives: Melvin Dixon, Assotto Saint, and Artistic Experimentation"

The book, an anthology of critical essays, poetry, personal narratives, interviews, and other writings, provides a vivid synopsis of writer and activist Joseph Beam (1954-1988) as well as other figures of the 1980s Black gay arts movement.

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Author/Lead: GerShun Avilez
Dates:
Black Gay Genius looks back at the 1980s, but also looks forward, seeking to build upon the artistic and political legacy of black gay men’s from the 1980s.

Read More about "Queer Forms, Black Lives: Melvin Dixon, Assotto Saint, and Artistic Experimentation"

"Cartographies of Desire: Mapping Queer Space in the Fiction of Samuel Delany and Darieck Scott"

Applying his knowledge of urban planning to the field of cultural theory, Haitian-American architect-artist Jean-Ulrick Désert invokes the concept of "queer space" in order to describe the complicated (yet valuable) nature of actual gay and lesbian commun

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Author/Lead: GerShun Avilez
Dates:
Locations, he contends, simultaneously engage and transgress the social, architectural, and juridical meanings attributed to the areas that they occupy by means of the subversive bodies that collectively inhabit and pass through them. He goes on to characterize this concept in these terms: "queer space is in large part the function of wishful thinking or desires that become solidified: a seduction of the reading space where queerness, at a few brief points and for some fleeting moments, dominates the (heterocentric) norm, the dominant social narrative of the landscape" (21, emphasis added).1 The term "queer space" is most often employed as a way to discuss and analyze the precarious positioning of gay, lesbian, and transgender social spaces and the politics of gentrification in regard to these locations.2 However, I believe that Désert's formulation reveals the potential of the lens of "queer space" to exceed its strictly geographical or architectural valence and provide a framework for theoretical and formal analysis within literary studies.

Read More about "Cartographies of Desire: Mapping Queer Space in the Fiction of Samuel Delany and Darieck Scott"

"Housing the Black Body: Value, Domestic Space, and Segregation Narratives.”

Linking mobility and housing, the article connects two issues to the rights and privileges of citizenship in a democracy.

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Author/Lead: GerShun Avilez
Dates:
Hansberry takes on residential segregation by confronting that practice not merely as a restriction on domestic space but mainly as a constriction of civic identity. The case intimates that, given the centrality of segregation to restrictive practices affecting citizenship, the relationship of African Americans to places of residence and to domestic space in general is indicative of their relationship to legal structures. The social and legal developments that directly and indirectly encouraged segregated housing during the mid-twentieth century created the conditions for African Americans to feel estranged from their domestic spaces. (1) The feelings of frustration and dissatisfaction with the "kitchenette" expressed in Gwendolyn Brooks's poem define the housing problems to come for many African American communities, and such sentiments factor into representations of domestic space in mid-20th-century African American narratives.

Read More about "Housing the Black Body: Value, Domestic Space, and Segregation Narratives.”

“Whispering Sexuality: Queerness and the Limits of Black Satire” in Greater Atlanta: African American Satire since Obama

Forthcoming Fall 2023

English

Author/Lead: GerShun Avilez

“Whispering Sexuality: Queerness and the Limits of Black Satire” in Greater Atlanta: African American Satire since Obama. Ed. Derek Maus and Kim Donahue (U of Mississippi P, forthcoming Fall 2023)

Service & Outreach

Director, Graduate Studies

Director, Graduate Studies at the University of Maryland English Department

English

Author/Lead: GerShun Avilez
Dates:
Fall 2019-Spring 2022