A conversation with Karla Holloway (Duke), Nyle Fort (Princeton), and Rhon Manigault-Bryant (Williams College). Moderated by Josef Sorett (Columbia, Religion).
Arguments about black death abound. In certain iterations, the long story of black life in the Americas is one defined by the looming prospect of premature, untimely, or even primordial death; from the status of “social death” under the terms of chattel slavery, to the contemporary struggles for life in the face of state (and state-sanctioned) violence unto death. A variety of critics, in this tradition, have observed some variation on the theme of what the poet Claudia Rankine surmised in her 2015 book, Citizen: “the condition of black life is one of mourning.” Yet, as Rankine’s own work suggests, the conditions of black living have been animated by a robust set of artistic, cultural, political, and spiritual performances that speak to an abundance of methods for flourishing, and for affirming the truth of the now iconic hashtag #BlackLivesMatter—before, after, and in the midst of death.
Register here.
Karla FC Holloway is James B. Duke Professor Emerita of English and Professor of Law at Duke University. She is the author of eight academic books that indicate her interdisciplinary interests in literature and law, cultural bioethics—especially ethics of care at the end of life, and African American Cultural Studies including Passed On: African American Mourning Stories and Legal Fictions: Constituting Race, Composing Literature. Her emerita years have begun with her début as a novelist. The first of her trilogy of Harlem Renaissance literary mysteries is A Death in Harlem (Triquarterly 2019) a novel that takes up the question and circumstance of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing — "death by misadventure?”
Nyle Fort is a minister, scholar, and activist based in Newark, New Jersey. He is currently joint Ph.D. candidate in religion and interdisciplinary humanities with a concentration in African American studies at Princeton University. His dissertation, Amazing Grief: The Politics of African American Mourning, is a scholarly meditation on the complex and contested ways public grief shape contemporary black activism. Nyle’s research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Forum for Theological Exploration, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Excellence through Diversity Dissertation Fellowship.
LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant is Professor of Africana Studies at Williams College and founder of ConjureGirlBlue Productions. A proud native of Moncks Corner, South Carolina, Rhon navigates the academy as a scholar-artist, where she merges her life as a thinker, musician and filmmaker. She is the author of multiple academic books, public-facing writing, and films including Talking to the Dead: Religion, Music, and Lived Memory among Gullah/Geechee Women (2014) and the acclaimed documentary short “death. everything. nothing” (2020). She is currently at work on “Welcome to Toxic Tallevast” a documentary on environmental contamination in an African-American community on Florida’s Gulf coast, and a monograph entitled “Black Crossroads: Mourning Rituals and Geographies of Sacred Space.”
Josef Sorett is Professor of Religion and African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University, where he is also chair of the Department of Religion and directs the Center on African-American Religion, Sexual Politics and Social Justice. As an interdisciplinary scholar of religion and race in the Americas, Josef employs primarily historical and literary approaches to the study of religion in black communities and cultures in the United States. His first book, Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics (2016) illumines how religion has figured in debates about black art and culture across the 20th century. A second book, The Holy Holy Black: The Ironies of an American Secular, is forthcoming with Oxford UP. Additionally, Josef is editing an anthology, The Sexual Politics of Black Churches, which will be published by Columbia University Press.