Please join us for a “What I Am Thinking About Now” presentation by Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, Associate Professor of American Studies and English at Brown University.

“A Tenuous Hold, Or Black Feminist Meditations on the Black Masculine”
In general, black people are vulnerable to demise or disappearance or being taken or had. The violability that defines blackness also produces blackness as antecedent and in excess of any normative claim to gendered distinction. In the eyes and operations of the US state, black genders are the exploited outcomes of distinct modes of racial terror. Nevertheless, because of racial slavery and its enduring legacies, being black comes from the mother line. In black feminist conversation with Kiese Laymon and Saeed Jones, this talk elucidates the subtleties of black survival that animate the relationship between black masculinities and the black maternal. For black masculinities, the source of ruin—of perpetual vulnerability and violability—may simultaneously be the source of repair.

RSVP: [email protected]. Snacks and caffeine will be provided.

“What I Am Thinking About Now” is an on-going informal workshop/seminar series to which faculty and graduate students are invited to present and discuss recently published work and work in progress. All are invited to attend and participate.