“The Sweetness that Survives the Slaughter,” Poetry, Photography, & Socially-Engaged Practice

How do we bridge the gap between individuals? Is there a redemptive beauty in the representation of a black body? Where in the image (linguistic and/or visual) does resistance/refusal lie? How do poetry and photographic images open up moments for intimacy? What is the relationship between the archetypal, the stereotypical, and what we create? Where is “blackness” located in diaspora: anchor or fissure, community or dispersal? How might we consider geographical space, traveling, the natural world, belonging, and displacement in our storytelling? Poet Aracelis Girmay, whose poems often serve a moral vision and enact both a generosity and a vulnerability calling forth a cross-continental history, joins photographer and social practice artist, Zun Lee, whose photographs and archives dynamically interact with the subjects on the other side of the lens, in the service of black resistance. The event will be moderated by Dawn Lundy Martin.

The Center for African American Poetry and Poetics’ (CAAPP) week-long Black Study Intensive, “Collective Protest and Rebellion,” features poet/essayist/novelist Dionne Brand, filmmaker Charles Burnett, filmmaker Julie Dash, poet/ performer/composer JJJJJerome Ellis, poet Aracelis Girmay, scholar Emily Greenwood, writer/cultural historian Saidiya Hartman, poet/scholar Erica Hunt, interdisciplinary theater artist Daniel Alexander Jones, photographer Zun Lee, poet/scholar Harryette Mullen, and poet Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon as a way to think in creativity toward collective agency and social change. With urgency, we look toward the 2020/2021 academic year as an opportunity to, in Fred Moten’s sense of the word, “study” together, what he sometimes calls talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. This week we come together to engage in black study in community during this time of upheaval and repair. It is here where we seek innovative discovery in the act of creating as productive of new knowledges that help change the world. We hope you’ll join us for the entire week!