This event will be held both in person at Petteruti Lounge, Stephen Robert ’62 Campus Center and online. No matter how you choose to join us, please register to attend.

CSREA’s New Book Talks highlight new and notable works studying race, ethnicity, and indigeneity from scholars both internal and external to Brown. They facilitate thought-provoking and critical engagement with emerging scholarship. View the entire New Book Talks series lineup here.

The Confessions of Matthew Strong, Ousmane Power-Greene’s wildly original, incendiary story about race and redemption chronicles the life of Allegra Douglass, a professor at a top-tier university in New York. When assembling evidence of the disappearances of young Black women, Allie herself disappears, kidnapped by white supremacist Matthew Strong. The story explores the dangerous imbalances that continue to destabilize society, and the value of speaking out for what’s right.

After Professor Power-Greene’s presentation, Professor of English Kevin Quashie will moderate a discussion with the audience.

Learn more about the book here.

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About the Author

A specialist in African American social and political movements, Professor Power-Greene teaches courses for undergraduates and graduate students on American history with a focus on African American internationalism and comparative social and political movements. His book, Against Wind and Tide: The African American Struggle against the Colonization Movement (NYU Press 2014), examines black Americans efforts to agitate for equal rights in the North and Midwest in the face the American Colonization Society’s colonization movement, which hoped to compel free blacks to leave the United States for Liberia. His current research projects include a study of Hubert Harrison and the New Negro movement, an examination of white northern colonizationists, and an exploration of African American emigration movements during the nineteenth century.

About the Moderator

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 Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being (Duke University Press, 2021) and The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2012). 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.