DATE & TIME
Thursday, November 22, 2018
1:15 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.
1:15 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.
Conferences & lectures
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Blackness and the Border
Comparing Contemporary African American and African Canadian Fiction in Terms of Racial Identity
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SPEAKER(S)
Derek C. Maus
COST
Free
WHERE
Henry F. Hall Building
1455 De Maisonneuve Blvd. W.
Room H-1120
WHEEL CHAIR ACCESSIBLE
Yes
Visiting Scholar Derek C. Maus (State University of New York College at Potsdam) presents his lecture examining the public debate surrounding whether black literary artists are bound by what James Baldwin called an "obligation of representation" in regard to their depictions of black life.
Such debates continue to the present, albeit in different contexts and with somewhat different stakes. The articulation of such concepts as “post-black art,” “the post-soul aesthetic,” and the “New Black Aesthetic” have all rekindled this long-running polemic within a generation of artists and thinkers who came of age after the Civil Rights Movement.
About Derek C. Maus
Derek C. Maus is Professor of English and Communication at the State University of New York at Potsdam, where he teaches numerous courses on a wide variety of subjects in contemporary literature. He is the author of Jesting in Earnest: Percival Everett and Menippean Satire (South Carolina, 2019), Understanding Colson Whitehead (South Carolina, 2014), and Unvarnishing Reality: Subversive Russian and American Cold War Satire (South Carolina, 2011). He has also edited several scholarly collections, including Conversations with Colson Whitehead (Mississippi, 2019), Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights (Mississippi, 2014; co-edited with James J. Donahue) and Finding a Way Home: A Critical Assessment of Walter Mosley’s Fiction (Mississippi, 2008; co-edited with Owen E. Brady).