Professor Irvine Hunt

Thur, 9:00-11:50AM

Black Women Poets on Radical Black Futures - In the collection Letters to the Future: Black WOMEN / Radical WRITING (2018), Erica Hunt explains why she and Dawn Lundy Martin brought this fleet of living writers together: “One dimension that drew our curiosity was to know how this particular group… would respond to the question of tomorrow.” Hunt and Martin were curious about how Black women writers are imagining “alternate ways of living out and through strictures of time.” Extending the temporal turn in Black literary scholarship, this seminar explores the nature and conditions of these contemporary “strictures”--the afterlives of modernity–and the alternative temporalities Black women poets have crafted. We will explore what makes the socialities, locations, and poetics of their timescapes revolutionary: what forms of community and care comprise them? What is the language that makes them possible? How have feminist approaches to Blackness, being, and embodiment produced shapes of time that build and protect interior, intimate, and private worlds? Our exploration, however, will not be entirely optimistic. Following Hunt and Martin, we will work to bear in mind that “living out and through” a “stricture” always entails the possibility of extending it, that “the question of tomorrow” is also a statement that tomorrow is in question. The Black poets gathered here will help us understand this ambiguity. We will examine how they have mixed a variety of media (visual art, sound, film, etc.) to imagine both apocalyptic and promising futures, and to push the limits of language. Probing a remarkable range of original concepts and aesthetic innovations that stretch and sometimes redefine the category of the future, we ultimately will theorize the capacity of gendered Blackness to create a new world. The seminar will take shape around risky conversations between critics and poets. Classical theories of gender, Blackness, and modernity by the Combahee River Collective, Hortense Spillers, and Sylvia Wynter will provide our grounding as we engage recent and new work in literary and cultural studies by Denise da Silva, Saidiya Hartman, Soyica Colbert, Kevin Quashie, Candice Jenkins, Margo Crawford, M. Jacqui Alexander, Sefanie Dunning, Katherine McKittrick, Kara Keeling, and Tina Campt. Alongside these scholarly studies, we will read collections of poetry by Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, M. NourbeSe Philip, Dionne Brand, Bettina Judd, Claudia Rankine, Nikky Finney, Evie Shockley, Aracelis Girmay, Tracy K. Smith, and Erica Hunt. Requirements will be two class presentations, three book reviews, and a conference-length paper (8-10 pages) that culminates in either a scholarly or a creative work.