CSREA's New Book Talks series highlights new and notable work in the study of race, ethnicity, and indigeneity from scholars both internal and external to Brown. The aim is to facilitate thought-provoking and critical engagement with emerging scholarship that helps the campus community understand how we study, research, and engage with the analysis of race, ethnicity, and indigeneity. In addition, these events provide important spaces for students, faculty, and fellows to familiarize themselves with new literature and ask detailed questions of writers in a constructive environment. During the Fall semester, the Center will invite four authors representing a wide spread of focus areas and disciplinary lenses for virtual discussions.

October 7th, 2021

The first installment brings Kevin Quashie, who will speak about his most recent work "Black Aliveness, or a Poetics of Being." Published by Duke University Press, the book imagines a world where we are confronted with a flood of Black aliveness rather than Black death. Quashie performs this analysis through the lens of poetry, building his theories from the radical words of feminist poets like Clifton, Lorde, and Morrison.

Kevin Quashie is a professor in the Department of English at Brown University who teaches Black cultural and literary studies. He is the author or editor of four books, most recently The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2012) and Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being (Duke University Press, 2021). Black feminist/women's studies has long been central to Quashie's thinking about Blackness. He also writes and teaches on Black queer studies and on aesthetics.

October 21st, 2021

The next event turns our attention to Native life in Providence. Written by Brown Professor of Anthropology Patricia Rubertone, "Native Providence: Memory, Community, and Survivance in the Northeast" studies how the city that houses our campus has contributed to the erasure and subjugation of local tribes. Despite its modest size, Providence had the third-largest Native American population in the United States by 1910. Through deep study of a varied archive, Rubertone unearths the meaningful attachments to land and community made by these families and individuals within the city and beyond, and tracks their transition alongside Providence's rapid development.

Patricia E. Rubertone is a Professor of Anthropology at Brown University. Her research navigates the intersections of anthropology (archaeology and ethnography) and history to study Indigenous and settler colonial communities, landscapes, and memories in Native North America, especially the Northeast.

November 11th, 2021

November brings legal scholar Laura E. Gómez from the University of California Los Angeles. Her work, "Inventing Latinos: A New Story of American Racism" charts the creation of the Latinx racial identity. It poses crucial questions as the Latino population in the United States grows past 20%--How does racism make some people's race less malleable than others? Is race something we choose, or something we are given by others? Gómez's legally-based perspective charts how the policies and attitudes of White supremacy adapt to control and confine new racial groups.

Laura E. Gómez is the Rachel F. Moran Endowed Chair in Law at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is the Director of the Critical Race Studies Program (and was its co-founder in 2000). She is the recipient of the 2021 American Bar Foundation Outstanding Scholar Award and numerous other professional recognitions.

December 2nd, 2021

The final installment occurs in December, with Stephon Alexander's "Fear of a Black Universe: An Outsider's Guide to the Future of Physics." In the work, Alexander offers three principles that shape the universe with their inconsistency--invariance, quantum change, and emergence--in support of the theory that great physics requires scientists to embrace the excluded, listen to the unheard, and be unafraid of being wrong. 

Stephon Alexander is a professor of theoretical physics at Brown University, an established jazz musician, and an immigrant from Trinidad who grew up in the Bronx. He is the 2020 president of the National Society of Black Physicists and a founding faculty director of Brown University's Presidential Scholars program, which boosts underrepresented students.