Riot and Refrain: Toni Morrison

Image courtesy of Toni Morrison. Photo: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.
Image courtesy of Toni Morrison. Photo: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.

Fully booked

Study Sessions are informal and intimate discussion groups. This study session opens out the ideas and themes of our exhibitions and research strand Sonic Continuum and explores how black feminist authors and thinkers reconceptualise voice, performativity and community against patriarchal and racial oppression.

By discussing their radical aspirations and concurrent approaches to gender, race and class, our study sessions explore the global critiques, poetic tactics, and relational political projects of black women writers, and ask: how might we articulate alternative social and political formations?

This session is led by literary scholar Portia Owusu and dwells on the work of American novelist and essayist, Toni Morrison.

Reading
Morrison, Toni. ‘Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature’ in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, 1988. pp. 123-163.

About the event

Online. Free. Limited Capacity.
Booking is required.
A copy of the reading will be available on booking.
You can access this event through the Zoom meeting link available on booking.
There will be automated live captioning for this event.
A transcription for this event is not available afterwards due to the intimate nature of the event.
We are unable to provide British Sign Language interpretation for this event.
The duration of the event is one and a half hours. A rest break is not included.

Portia Owusu is Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University, where she teaches and researches topics in Africa and diaspora literature. Her research interests include history and historiography, memory and contemporary narratives of slavery. She has published on these topics in articles and is the author of Spectres from the Past: Slavery and the Politics of "History" in West African and African-American Literature (2019). Her current project is on death and mourning in Africa and the diaspora. Owusu is a graduate of SOAS, the University of London (PhD), the University of York (MA), and the University of Kent (BA). She was also a US-UK Fulbright Visiting Researcher at the University of Kansas in 2015-16.

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