CLIC warmly invites you to a lecture by Brent Hayes Edwards, current editor of PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association), on 21 May, titled "Editing Diaspora: Translating Black Culture across Borders".
The lecture will take place in Usquare, Room AC.0.01 (“Glass Hall”), from 16:00 to 17:30. Please click here to reserve your free tickets. Registration closes on 13 May.
Following the lecture, a reception will be held in the same location from 17:30 to 18:30.
About Brent Hayes Edwards
Professor Edwards is the Peng Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He has published widely on African diasporic literature and the interconnections between literature and music, and is the author of the award-winning The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard UP, 2003), Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (Harvard UP, 2017), and the co-written autobiography of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Henry Threadgill, Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music (Penguin Random House, 2023).
Abstract
It is a striking fact of twentieth-century African diasporic culture that so many major Black writers and intellectuals (including W. E. B. Du Bois, Hubert Harrison, Richard Wright, C. L. R. James, Paulette Nardal, Aimé Césaire, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, and Nathaniel Mackey) have done important work as journal and newspaper editors. Nevertheless, it is still lamentably uncommon for literary scholars to analyze and appreciate the work of editors, to take stock of the subtle and difficult labor of publishing a periodical. How do we come to terms with the unique "backstage" art of editing, especially when it is a matter of using a periodical to foster a transnational community by translating among Black populations across the globe? Edwards will talk about the politics of editorial work in the African diaspora, drawing on this rich history as well as on his own two-decade experience as the editor of the journals Social Text and PMLA.
