Circle of Thought Lecture

Evie Shockley is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She is the author of Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African Ameri-can Poetry, as well as two books of poetry, a half-red sea and the new black (which won the 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry). Her essays and poetry have appeared recent-ly or are forthcoming in The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Poetry, LitHub The Best American Poetry 2015, and The Best American Experimental Writing 2015, among other publications. This talk situates Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007) — part history, part memoir — within a body of contemporary narratives of slavery that serve to make black subjectivity visible in an era of colorblind” ideology. Hart-man recounts her attempts to reconnect with her African history by traveling to Ghana’s Gold Coast and tracing the slave routes backward to the interior.Haines Hall Room 135″