THEORIZING BLACK LITERATURE NOW -- RUTGERS 2016

Evie Shockley and Carter Mathes pulled together a remarkable congress of thinkers and writers a couple weeks ago for a two day discussion exploring current and future directions in African American literary criticism. We met in the Plangere Writing Center at Rutgers University, the wind whipping the streets outside (about the coldest I've experienced in recent years) and driving us into the warmth of our conferring. Urban tumbleweeds we were, our spirits blown up mighty mighty.

I came eagerly looking forward to discussions with the people listed in the program; when I got there I found poets Tonya Foster, Ron Silliman and Erica Hunt in the house, and scholars Kathryne Gines, Cheryl Wall and Mary Helen Washington, along with so many others who had braved the weather to join together.

I was on the first panel, "The Nation and State in African American Literature," with Miriam Thaggert and Erica Edwards, Tasia Milton responding. My presentation was another installment from the work I've been doing this year on temporality, race and nation, As usual with me, I was operating from a floating home base in music and verse. I didn't get any panel selfies; maybe someone in the audience has a photo of us. But I did collect a good audio recording of the session.

Other sessions took up "Defining Blackness" and "Metacritical Directions." Brent Hayes Edwards offered a keynote with further meditations on the archive.

At the close, Mathes and Shockley, who had been writing constantly in those little notebooks of theirs, drew forth a set of discussion questions and, like the title says, future directions. Then it was off to dinner, where we continued our round table at one long, narrow table.