Narratives about swamp people and swamp things punctuate the story of the New World, from the maroon communities constituted by Native peoples and formerly enslaved Africans dating back at least to the early sixteenth century to the first Asian settlement in the US, located in swamps surrounding present day New Orleans in the eighteenth century. As a nonbinary space that is neither land nor water but both, the swamp serves as the material grounds—as the “terra infirma”—for a series of considerations about transformation and difference. Drawn from Professor C. Riley Snorton's new work, Mud: Ecologies of Racial Meaning, this lecture weaves together the insights of Black ecologies and trans studies through a nonbinary analytic to raise questions about the coloniality of climate (change) and being.
Thursday, November 9, 2023, 5:00pm
Thompson Room, Barker Center #110, 12 Quincy St. Cambridge, MA
This event is free and open to the public and will be followed by a brief reception.
His research draws from Black studies, queer theory and trans theory, seeking to complicate and expand those histories through the creation of a new vocabulary. His award-winning book Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (2017) was the first publication to weave together the study of race and transgender identity, exploring those intersections from the 19th century to the present. Among the book’s awards are the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association, the John Boswell Prize from the American Historical Association, the Lamba Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction and the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies.
Professor Snorton’s first book Nobody Is Supposed to Know (2014) examines how negative perceptions of Black sexuality are reinforced by media and pop culture portrayals of the “down low”—Black men who have sex with men without identifying as gay, queer, or bisexual. His next monograph, tentatively titled Mud: Ecologies of Racial Meaning, looks at the pervasive presence of swamps in racial practices and formations in the Americas. With Hentyle Yapp, he is the co-editor of Saturation: Race, Art and the Circulation of Value (New Museum/MIT Press, 2020), and he is also the co-editor of GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies.
The F.O. Matthiessen Visiting Professorship of Gender and Sexuality was created at Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) through the generous support of the Harvard Gender and Sexuality Caucus (HGSC) -- formerly the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Caucus. The resulting endowment enables Harvard to regularly invite eminent scholars studying issues related to sexuality or sexual minorities -- that is, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people -- to teach in the FAS.
F. O. Matthiessen (1902–1950), founder of the field of American Studies, was a distinguished, gay Harvard professor who chaired the undergraduate program in history and literature at Harvard and was the first senior tutor of Eliot House. He is considered “the most eminent American literary critic of the first half of the twentieth century.” For his time, Professor Matthiessen was an unusual example of a gay man who lived with his sexuality as an “open secret.” He and his partner, artist Russell Cheney, were together for 23 years until Cheney’s death. Because of Matthiessen's unique position as a prominent Harvard scholar and his inspiring commitment to his life partner, he is a fitting choice for a named chair in this field.
This event is co-sponsored by the Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, the Harvard Gender and Sexuality Caucus, and the Open Gate Foundation.
LOCATION:Thompson Room, Barker Center 110 12 Quincy St. Cambridge, MA STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20231109T220000Z DTEND:20231110T000000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR