Please join the Black studies Colloquium Event
Zoom: https://occidental.zoom.us/j/86062631626
ID: 860 6263 1626
Passcode: 860824
James Ford is Associate Professor in English and Black Studies at Occidental College. He published Thinking through Crisis: Depression-Era Black Literature and Politics in 2019. He has two book projects underway: Hip-Hop's Late Style: Liner Notes to an Aesthetic Theory and Phillis, the Black Swan: Disheveling the Origins of African American Literature.
In Thinking through Crisis, James Ford reconsiders how cultural-political agency emerges from a traumatic experience. By turning to Black Radical writers in the 1930s, including Richard Wright, Ida B Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes, Ford counter theories of trauma that remain nostalgic for Eurocentric subjectivity. Moreover, these writers used modernist, surrealist, and proletarian aesthetics to reframe fugitive slaves, sharecroppers, levee workers, and others as protagonists combatting racism and capitalist exploitation. The project intervenes in debates on the 1930s, states of emergency, and intellectual history.
An excerpt from the book is available here.
