“Empire After Civil Rights: Race, Outer Space, and the New Geographies of Colonialism”

Duke English invites you to the Tennenhouse-Armstrong Lecture featuring Julius Fleming, Associate Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. Fleming earned a PhD in English and a graduate certificate in African studies from the University of Pennsylvania. He specializes in Afro-diasporic literature and cultures and has interests in performance studies, black political culture, diaspora, and colonialism, especially where they intersect with race, gender, and sexuality. Fleming is the author of Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation, which received the 2024 College Language Association Book Prize and the 2022 Hooks National Book Award.
"Empire After Civil Rights: Race, Outer Space, and the New Geographies of Colonialism"
This talk explores how the Civil Rights and decolonization movements helped to instigate a new era of empire and colonialism. It examines how, at the same time that formerly colonized nations were gaining independence, and black people across the globe were beginning to secure social and political freedoms, outer space became a new frontier of global empire building and colonial exploration. It argues that, in the face of this watershed transformation of modernity's racial geographies, imperial powers like the United States and France worked to convert outer space into the provenance of a distinct post-war site of imperial and colonial expansion. Further, it considers how this quest to colonize outer space entailed a strategic reanimation of prior colonial geographies and networks of colonial relation. But in the face of this scramble to colonize outer space, black artists and activists-from Zambia to the United States to Martinique-turned to outer space in their art and politics to craft anti-colonial, anti-imperial, and anti-racist critiques of this global endeavor to constitute empire anew.
The Tennenhouse-Armstrong Lecture was established in 2023 in honor of Duke English emeriti Leonard Tennenhouse and Nancy Armstrong.