New Podcast Explores Past, Present and Future of Black Studies
John Drabinski and Ashley Newby’s “The Black Studies Podcast” is supported by a $100k grant from the Mellon Foundation.
In first grade, at seven years of age, I started catechism classes like everyone else in my school. A part of me was excited about it, and a part of me was scared. Today I know that the part of me that was scared was precisely responsible for my excitement, kind of like when we watch horror movies.
Glissant and the Middle Passage establishes Édouard Glissant’s proper place as a key theorist of ruin, catastrophe, abyss, and memory. Identifying his insistence on memories and histories tied to place as the crucial geography at the heart of his work, this book imparts an innovative new response to the specific historical experiences of the Middle Passage.
As a college student at Gdańsk University in the 1980s, I learned that Polish Nazis had existed, and that they bore swastikas, the symbol of their pride, tattooed in their armpits. I imagined them shaving their armpits just before the war, before Hitler invaded Poland on the first day of September 1939, and then waiting, after Germany’s defeat, for the hair to grow back to cover their worst secret. Walking the streets of Gdańsk, and passing the men of my grandfather’s generation, I wondered sometimes which ones had swastikas in their armpits. Did I know anyone who had a hidden swastika? I felt uneasy about sharing with them my language, my heritage, my culture, my music, my architecture, even the food we considered Polish. Something I don’t really believe in—a collective, tribal guilt—got its grip on me.
By imagining and constructing the dialogue to function as a metadiscourse on the conversational theories that provide the speaking points of her characters, Scudéry enacts her rhetorical theory of sermo in addition to describing it. After an overview of varying forms of the dialogue genre in Renaissance Europe, a comparison between Scudéry's Conversations and Sir Thomas Elyot's The Defence of Good Women illuminates Scudéry's feminist construction of the genre and exemplifies her choice to use the dialogue to both perform and advance her theories on conversational practice.
Clark Atlanta University, Spring 2019.
Co-authored with Laurel Bassett. “Got Gout?: Eighteenth-Century Global ‘Remedies’ in Mary Kettilby’s Receipt Book.” Blog post on the Folger Shakespeare Library’s The Collation: Research and Exploration at the Folger.
Read More about "Got Gout?: Eighteenth-Century Global 'Remedies' in Mary Kettilby's Receipt Book."
Read More about “‘Painful Repetition’: Service Work and the Rise of the Restaurant Novel.”