2024 Annual Hoffman Lecture

For Reel, For Real: New Approaches to (Auto)biography 

In this lecture, poet Claudia Rankine will consider new methods employed by artists and writers to document a "poetics of being," where modes of (auto)biographical practice recapture the complexities of lives that have been flattened by narratives framed by historical trauma. These new works display lives that are alive with the business of living, loving, trying, tiring, fleeing, fighting, bleeding, laughing, moaning, mourning, weeping, dying, doing and doing—all verbs from Lucille Clifton's poem "Reply." Kevin Quashie, in his book Black Aliveness, or a Poetics of Being, contextualizes Clifton's poem as a response to a question W.E. B Dubois once was asked in a letter from a researcher re: "Whether the Negro sheds tears…" Quashie points out that violence lives within aliveness and is only part of the Black story. In the necessary focus on all manner of racisms, wars, colonialisms, misogyny, have we redirected the gaze from our indisputable aliveness too completely? For Reel, For Real seeks to re-center and reenter ordinary black aliveness along with other individual stories through the work of Martine Syms, Harmony Holiday, John Akomfrah, Carrie Mae Weems, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Titus Kaphar, Mel Chin, Alexandra Bell and others.

Claudia Rankine  is an American poet, essayist, playwright and the editor of several anthologies. She is the author of five volumes of poetry, two plays and various essays. Her poems investigate many kinds of boundaries: the unsettled territory between poetry and prose, between the word and the visual image, between what it's like to be a subject and the ways we're defined from outside by skin color, economics, and global corporate culture.

Sponsors:  Comparative Literature Program, Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life, African and African American Studies, Jewish Studies Program, International and Interdisciplinary Studies Office, English and Creative Writing Department