What We Dare Not Remember: Jonestown and the "Mattering of Black Life

Dr. Reid-Pharr asks, why, in a period in U.S. history in which questions of Black life and Black death are at the center of our public debates, have so few intellectuals taken up the matter of the 918 individuals, most of whom were African American, who died in a mass suicide in "Jonestown," Guyana in 1978? Reading the details of the events against works of fiction and poetry by Wilson Harris and Pat Parker, Reid-Pharr asks how we might develop new forms of memorialization that name-and value-both the victors and the victims, the noble and the vulgar.