The Negro Intellectual and Her Crises: Black Women’s Studies through Spillers, Shadrack, and Sula

The Negro Intellectual and Her Crises: Black Women’s Studies through Spillers, Shadrack, and Sula

College of Arts and Humanities | English Wednesday, February 16, 2022 5:00 pm - 6:15 pm Virtual

Antiracism: Communities + Collaborations presents "The Negro Intellectual and Her Crises: Black Women’s Studies through Spillers, Shadrack, and Sula” featuring Casey Patterson, Stanford University (B.A. UMD 2016). Moderated by Professor Randy Ontiveros (Director of Honors Humanities) with an introduction by Professor Merle Collins. Co-sponsored by the Honors College.

Register for this event.

For questions contact Tita Chico (tchico@umd.edu).

Bios

Casey Patterson is a PhD Candidate in the Stanford University Department of English and a graduate of the University of Maryland, College Park (class of 2016). His research focuses on the under-recognized influence of the educational institution in shaping African American literary theory. Since the Reconstruction period, the school has operated as a mode of production and distribution for Black art/propaganda, and in the longe duree of African American letters schooling has signified ascension along the great Chain of Being. The disciplinary formation of African American literary studies, from the 1970s to the 1990s, is the complement to and culmination of these precedents. When, through the history of Black education, the protocols of scholarship and pedagogy in African American literature are considered in continuity with that literature’s production, they cohere in a transhistoric collaboration to introduce Black culture to the institution of knowledge. Close reading the back-and-forth conversation between the literary text and the school, an institutional identity of African American literature is negotiated.
Twitter: @KCWayneP

Merle Collins is a distinguished Grenadian poet, short story writer, and emerita of the University of Maryland Department of English. Her works include "Themes and Trends in Caribbean Writing Today" in From My Guy to Sci-Fi: Genre and Women's Writing in the Postmodern World and "To be Free is Very Sweet" in Slavery and Abolition.Her first collection of poetry Because the Dawn Breaks was published by Karia Press in 1985. At this time she was a member of African Dawn, a performance group combining poetry, mime and African music. In 1987, she published her first novel Angel, which follows the lives of both Angel and the Grenadian people as they struggle for independence. This was followed by a collection of short stories, Rain Darling in 1990, and a second collection of poetry, Rotten Pomerack, in 1992. Her second novel, The Colour of Forgetting, was published in 1995.
Twitter: @Pomerak

Randy Ontiveros writes and teaches in the areas of contemporary American literature and Chicano/Latino literary and cultural studies at the University of Maryland. His first book, In the Spirit of a New People: The Cultural Politics of the Chicano Movement, is published by New York University Press. The book studies the literature, theater, music, non-fiction prose, and other creative genres of the Chicano civil rights movement. His second book project is about the suburbs in Latino/a literature and politics. In the classroom he teaches surveys and topics in US Latino/a Literature, contemporary American literature, cultural studies, the literature of Maryland, and more.
Twitter: @randyontiveros1