Automobility's Cruel Optimism: Claudia Rankine, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Black Lives Matter
Work in progess-seminarium. Seminariet är ett samarbete mellan forskningsområdet Språk, litteratur och kultur och seminarieserien VitKrit. Alla intresserade är välkomna!
Presentationen kommer att vara på engelska, diskussionen på engelska och svenska. Seminariet är på campus med zoommöjligheter.
Zoom-länk: https://gu-se.zoom.us/j/67331230778 (lösenord: 069351)
Det finns möjlighet att ta del av texten ca en vecka i förväg; kontakta Andrea Castro (andrea.castro@sprak.gu.se) om du är intresserad.
Joel Duncan presents a draft of the final chapter of his book-in-progress, Poetic Drive: Experimental American Poetry in the Automobile Age. This chapter, tentatively titled “Mourning,” explores the poetry and video work of Claudia Rankine as well as the writing of Ta-Nehisi Coates. Rankine’s book Citizen (2014) locates the repetitive experience of racism, which troubles liberal narratives of progress, inside the automobile, which is also the site of police violence toward black drivers. Rankine confronts the violence inherent in U.S. automobility in a scene from Citizen where the poet sits still in their car while mourning white supremacy. Strikingly, Coates also uses the stopped car as a site of mourning for the loss of black life in Between the World and Me (2015). Following Coates this chapter also suggests how the stopped car as a site of mourning offers a model for not only confronting racist violence, but also climate catastrophe.