Under the Blacklight: Storytelling While Black and Female: Conjuring Beautiful Experiments in Past and Future Worlds

On this episode of our hit Under The Blacklight series, Kimberlé Crenshaw will be joined by N.K Jemisin and Saidiya Hartman, two revolutionary and genre-defying authors who use speculative fiction, science fiction, and fantasy to craft narratives which center the lives, experiences, and stories of Black precarity. Hartman and Jemisin write the violence of the past into their imaginations of a limitless future. This episode will center conversations about being Black and Female writers whose work provokes a glimpse into a commonly untold history and demands a radical reimagination of our lived reality by conjuring beautiful experiments in past and future worlds. These powerhouses utilize historiographical and archival research in tandem with their creation of fantastical worlds to address the gaps in dominant narratives about slavery and its aftermath in the United States. We will discuss the literary and cultural critiques Jemisin and Hartman receive in opposition to their genre-bending, and discuss the important ways in which radical tradition and storytelling are pivotal in anti-racist thought and praxis.

Over the past four months, AAPF’s Under The Blacklight series has heard from scholars, activists, and thought leaders like Ayanna Pressley, Kim Foxx, Barbara Lee, Pramila Jayapal, Keith Ellison, Ai-Jen Poo, Alicia Garza, Ibram X. Kendi, V (formerly known as Eve Ensler), Marc Lamont Hill, Naomi Klein, Eddie Glaude Jr., David Blight, and Arundhati Roy, among many others. They've talked with us about what is happening on the ground, how we can contextualize it historically and theoretically, and how an intersectional frame shows us the particular vulnerabilities that the twin pandemics -- COVID-19 & police brutality -- put in sharp relief.

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N(ora). K. Jemisin is a New York Times-bestselling author of speculative fiction short stories and novels, who lives and writes in Brooklyn, NY. In 2018, she became the first author to win three Best Novel Hugos in a row for her Broken Earth trilogy. She has also won a Nebula Award, two Locus Awards, and a number of other honors. She is a member of the Altered Fluid writing group. In addition to writing, she has been a counseling psychologist and educator (specializing in career counseling and student development), a hiker and biker, and a political/feminist/anti-racist blogger. Although she no longer pens the New York Times Book Review science fiction column called “Otherworldly” (which she covered for 3 years), her reviews can still be found online. N. K. Jemisin’s most recent novel The City We Became is the first piece of the Great Cities trilogy where cities can become sentient beings.

Saidiya Hartman received a BA (1984) from Wesleyan University and a PhD (1992) from Yale University. She was a professor in the Department of English and African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley (1992–2006), prior to joining the faculty of Columbia University, where she is currently a professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. She is the former director of the Institute for Research on Gender and Sexuality at Columbia University and was a Whitney Oates Fellow at Princeton University (2002), a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library (2016–2017), and a Critical Inquiry Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago (2018). In addition to her books, she has published articles in journals such as South Atlantic Quarterly, Brick, Small Axe, Callaloo, The New Yorker and The Paris Review. In her most recent book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century.

**** Registration for this conversation is through Eventbrite. All interested attendees will receive a link to the live-stream on the day of the event. This event will also be recorded. ****