THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELED (May be rescheduled)

The Wendy Rosenthal Gellman Lecture on Modern Literature by Brent Hayes Edwards (Columbia University), 2019-20 Invited Society Scholar, Society for the Humanities
"Black Radicalism and the Archive: Inventories of Fire"
Thursday, March 19, 4:30 p.m.
Guerlac Room, A.D. White House

What would it mean to consider archiving (documentation, classification, preservation) not as passive and retrospective, but instead as interventionist and aspirational—an integral component of black radical practice? This lecture explores this question through the example of civil rights activist James Forman's extensive research in the late 1960s for his unfinished biography of Frantz Fanon.

Brent Hayes Edwards is the Peng Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Jazz Studies. His publications include The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (2003), the co-edited collection Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (2004), and scholarly editions of classic works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Joseph Conrad, and Claude McKay. His most recent books are his translation of Michel Leiris’s monumental 1934 Phantom Africa (2017) and Edwards’s own Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination, which won the 2018 ASCAP Foundation Virgil Thomson Award for Outstanding Music Criticism as well as the 2019 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. Edwards was a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow. He is a 2019-20 Invited Society Scholar for the Cornell University Society for the Humanities.

The Gellman Lecture, featuring a distinguished scholar of modern literature, was established by a generous gift from Wendy Rosenthal Gellman ‘81, who majored in English at Cornell.

Reception to follow in the Dining Room, A.D. White House

Free and open to the public

This event is presented by the Department of English & the Society for Humanities