On State Violence and the Arts of Attention in Contemporary Black Women's Writing

The Program in Literature presents
Race and the Global Humanities Lecture Series

Erica Edwards

On State Violence and the Arts of Attention in Contemporary Black Women's Writing

Tuesday, February 28, 2023
1:30pm
Friedl Building, Room 225

This talk considers how U.S. Black women writers transfigured state-mediated forms of attention--surveillance, panoptic carcerality, political spectacle, pop cultural celebration--into insurgent modes of survival and communal care. Discussing the arts of attention in contemporary Black women's writing, this talk shows how contemporary Black women's literature counters black women's hypervisuality with its tendencies toward obscurity, inscrutability, and communal vigilance.

Erica R. Edwards is Professor of African American Studies and English at Yale University. She is a scholar of African American literature and culture and feminist studies. Her most recent book, The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of U.S. Empire (NYU Press, 2021), was awarded the John Hope Franklin Book Prize from the American Studies Association and was an honorable mention for the MLA's James Russell Lowell Prize. Her first book, Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership, (University of Minnesota Press), was awarded the Modern Language Association's William Sanders Scarborough Prize. Professor Edwards is the co-editor, with Roderick Ferguson and Jeffrey Ogbar, of Keywords for African American Studies.