Black Patience: A Colloquy
Black Patience: A Colloquy
Antiracism: Communities + Collaborations presents "A colloquy on Julius B. Fleming, Jr.’s Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation (New York University Press, 2022).
Moderated by Distinguished University Professor Emerita Mary Helen Washington.
With Professors Soyica Colbert (Georgetown U), Julius Fleming, Jr. (UMD), Kevin Quashie (Brown U), and Erica R. Edwards (Rutgers U).
For questions contact Tita Chico (tchico@umd.edu).
Bios
Mary Helen Washington is Distinguished University Professor Emerita in the English Department at the University of Maryland, College Park, specializing in 20th and 21st century African American literature. Her monograph, The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s (Columbia University Press, 2014) received Honorable Mention in the William Sanders Scarborough Prize competition from The Modern Language Association. She has edited three collections of African American literature: Memory of Kin: Stories About Family by Black Writers (Random House, February 1991; Black-Eyed Susans and Midnight Birds: Stories By and About Black Women, reprinted Doubleday/Anchor, January 1990; and Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860-1960, Doubleday/Anchor, September 1987. From 1976-1980, she was the Director of Black Studies at the University of Detroit. From 1980 to 1990, she taught at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. She was president of The American Studies Association from 1996-1997 and was awarded the American Studies Association’s Carl Bode-Norman Holmes Pearson Prize for lifetime achievement in 2015. Her current project is Afterlives: Legacies of the Black Literary Left.
Soyica Diggs Colbert is the Idol Family Professor of African American Studies and Performing Arts at Georgetown University. Colbert’s most recent book, Radical Vision, a “loving, lavishly detailed” (New York Times) and captivating portrait of Lorraine Hansberry’s life, art, and political activism—one of O Magazine's best books of April 2021 is also described as "A devoted and deeply felt account of the development of an artist’s mind," according to Dave Itzkoff, New York Times Book Review. Colbert has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support a residency at the Schomburg Center, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, Stanford University, Mellon Foundation, and the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University.
Twitter @DrSoyica
Julius B. Fleming, Jr.’s research engages Afro-Diasporic literature, Black political culture, and performance studies, with a particular focus on intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. He is the author of Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation (New York U Press, 2022) and is an assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland.
Twitter @juliusflemingjr
Kevin Quashie teaches black cultural and literary studies and is a professor in the department of English. Primarily, he focuses on black feminism, queer studies, and aesthetics, especially poetics. He is the author or editor of four books, most recently The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (2012) and Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being (2021). Currently, he is thinking about a book of black sentences and black ideas.
Erica R. Edwards is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, where she holds the Presidential Term Chair in African American Literature. She is the author of The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of U.S. Empire and Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership. She is the co-editor of Keywords for African American Studies, published in 2018 by NYU Press. Her work on African American literature, politics, and gender critique has appeared in journals such as differences, Callaloo, American Quarterly, American Literary History, and Black Camera.
Follow the Conversation @UMDEnglish