Research & Innovation

Staging plays like Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot for black southern audiences, the theater challenged a violent structure of time at the heart of global modernity that I call black patience. By this I mean an abiding historical demand for black people to wait: whether in the hold of the slave ship, on the auction block, or for emancipation from slavery. Focusing on the centrality of the plantation to the spatializing logics of black patience, I consider how the Free Southern Theater used performance to demand “freedom now” and to revise the oppressive histories of time rooted in the material geographies of the US South. Mounting time-conscious plays, the theater used temporal aesthetics to transform the region’s historical geographies of black time (e.g., the labor time of black slaves and sharecroppers working in cotton fields) into radical sites of black political action, aesthetic innovation, and embodied performance. Engaging and reinvesting the meanings of the South’s plantation geographies, the theater revealed how one hundred years after emancipation, time remained essential to procuring the afterlives of slavery and colonialism and to shoring up the region’s necropolitical attachments. Examining these aesthetic and political experiments illuminates the importance of time to the emerging field of black geographies and to the field of black studies more broadly.

Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Cold Mountain Review, Kweli, Nimrod, Poet Lore, and Witness. She is completing a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland. She teaches at the University of Hartford.

As this report goes to press, actions that are being considered in Congress are likely to do more harm than good. Sadly, the promise of community mental health remains unfulfilled. In 1990, NAMI released its last state ratings report. It described a system of services that, despite enormous expenditure of resources, was not “even minimally acceptable.” It detailed great regional and state variations in the existing system of care. Sixteen years later, mental illnesses cause more disability than any other class of medical illness in America. Recent reports from the U.S. Surgeon General, President Bush’s New Freedom Commission, and the Institute of Medicine describe well a “system in shambles” and the “chasm” between promise and performance.

We make too much of too little, or something of nothing. Yet what looks simply like a bad habit, Gerard Passannante argues, was also a spur to some of the daring conceptual innovations and feats of imagination that defined the intellectual and cultural history of the early modern period. Reaching back to the time between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, Passannante traces a history of catastrophizing through literary and philosophical encounters with materialism—the view that the world is composed of nothing but matter. As artists, poets, philosophers, and scholars pondered the physical causes and material stuff of the cosmos, they conjured up disasters out of thin air and responded as though to events that were befalling them. From Leonardo da Vinci’s imaginative experiments with nature’s destructive forces to the fevered fantasies of doomsday astrologers, from the self-fulfilling prophecies of Shakespeare’s tragic characters to the mental earthquakes that guided Kant toward his theory of the sublime, Passannante shows how and why the early moderns reached for disaster when they ventured beyond the limits of the sensible. He goes on to explore both the danger and the critical potential of thinking catastrophically in our own time.

The history of electronic hypertext and hypertext theory, the technological challenges of born digital writing and archiving, book-archives and archival poetics, and the value of innovative writing and deep reading amidst the current century's "hodgepodge," "higgledy-piggledy" social media.

Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Cold Mountain Review, Kweli, Nimrod, Poet Lore, and Witness. She is completing a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland. She teaches at the University of Hartford.

Winner of the Roland H. Bainton Prize for Literature (Oxford University Press, 2019), 272pp., ISBN: 9780198834663.

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Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Cold Mountain Review, Kweli, Nimrod, Poet Lore, and Witness. She is completing a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland. She teaches at the University of Hartford.

Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Cold Mountain Review, Kweli, Nimrod, Poet Lore, and Witness. She is completing a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland. She teaches at the University of Hartford.

The rooster turns its head to listen. There is something Dominican that is captured in the beak of each word as this woman moves among her people. She brings lines that are lush and filled with reminders. Yes -- 'Someone has set the cat among the pigeons.