KEVIN QUASHIE is a professor in the department of English. 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).

Overview

In a world-context shaped by urgency—even the need for insurgency—I want to consider what we can learn from thinking about aesthetics and time, about aesthetic time. Particularly, I want to explore the possibility for a black present in the specificity of sentences. What is the invocation of “now” that lives in a poetic line or a prose phrase, and can that sense of “now” inform how we understand the political—even the historical? In asking these questions, I want to appraise again the disciplinary dimensions of black literary studies.