Estrangement, Consolation: On Black Criticism

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In a world-context shaped by urgency and insurgency, Kevin Quashie considers aesthetic temporality and specificity of sentences. What is the invocation of “now” that lives in a poetic line or a prose phrase, and is it distinct from the “now” of insurgency? How does the act - the phenomenon - of reading explicate what we might know of criticism? In these queries, he explores some of the conditions of black literary criticism given the state of a disastrous world.

Kevin Quashie teaches black cultural and literary studies and is a professor in the department of English. Primarily, he focuses on black feminism, queer studies, and aesthetics, especially poetics. He is the author or editor of four books, most recently The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (2012) and Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being (2021). Black Aliveness has been awarded two prizes: the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association (2022) and the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism from the Poetry Foundation (2022). 

Contact: alexandra.kingston-reese@york.ac.uk