HISTORIES OF THE FUTURE
RACE MATTERS
Wednesday, March 22, 2017 at 4:00 pm, 1008 Humanities
Daphne A. Brooks, Yale University
The Knowles Sisters’ Political Hour: Black Feminist Dissent in Sound at the end of the Third Reconstruction
This talk explores the poetics of sonic dissent in the work of two of pop’s most influential activist voices: the sisters Beyonce and Solange Knowles. It explores the visual and literary insurgencies in their respective repertoires while paying close attention to the ways in which each artist draws on a combination of classic protest strategies and new aesthetic lines of resistance that challenge and complicate constructions of 21st century black subjectivities.
Daphne A. Brooks is Professor of African American Studies and Theater Studies at Yale University. She is the author of Jeff Buckley’s Grace and Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom,1850-1910, winner of The Errol Hill Award for Outstanding Scholarship on African American Performance. Brooks is currently working on a new book entitled Subterranean Blues: Black Women Sound Modernity, forthcoming from Harvard University Press.
Thursday, March 23, 2017 at 4:00 pm, 1008 Humanities
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Yale University
The Historian’s Eye: Meditations on Photography, History, and the American Present
Download PDF Poster
Based on documentary photography and oral history fieldwork carried out during the
Obama years, Jacobson examines the collective response to America’s first black president
and traces and historicizes the emergence of what we now know as Trumpism between
the crash of 2008 and the election of 2016.
Matthew Frye Jacobson is William Robertson Coe Professor of American Studies & History and Professor of
African American Studies at Yale University. He is currently at work on his sixth
book, Odetta’s Voice and other Weapons: The Civil Rights Era as Cultural History, and on several web- and film-based documentary projects.intersections of race, gender, class, and nationalism in the context of sports.
