Thursday, March 19, 2020 12:30pm to 2:00pm
About this Event
Fifth Avenue at Bigelow, Pittsburgh, PA 15260
https://www.humcenter.pitt.edu/This event has been postponed until further notice.
The Humanities Center welcomes our Visiting Fellow Emily Greenwood (Yale University, Classics) for a colloquium. Her respondents will be Harryette Mullen, author of Sleeping with the Dictionary (UCLA, English) and Dionne Brand, author of The Blue Clerk (University of Guelph, English).
Emily Greenwood studied Classics at Cambridge University, where she gained her BA, MPhil, and PhD degrees. After finishing her PhD she was a research fellow at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge (2000–2002), before joining the department of Classics at the University of St Andrews where she was lecturer in Greek from 2002–2008. She joined the Classics department at Yale in July 2009.
Abstract:
Black women poets in the Americas have been responding to Greek and Roman Classics for almost two hundred and fifty years, dating back to Phillis Wheatley’s 1773 volume, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. The visionary, contemporary poets Dionne Brand and Harryette Mullen possess this tradition and signify on it, through a literary method that bears comparison with Sarah Ahmed’s definition of “queer use” — the use of works for purposes very different from that for which they were originally intended and by others than those for whom they were originally intended. In The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos (2018), Dionne Brand advances a theory and practice of verso poetics, punning on the recto / verso hierarchy of the page in the history of the book. Harryette Mullen suggests another model of the black classical tradition as counter-script, inventing the concept of the “recyclopedia” (Mullen Recyclopedia (2006)) to offer a levelling history of use in which the Greek poet Sappho is re-envisioned as the black, vernacular muse who overwrites the tradition that has written her down (Muse & Drudge (1995); reprinted in Recyclopedia). This talk will suggest that Brand’s and Mullen’s practice of verso poetics cannily goes back to the Classics with black, womanist difference to find a way around the outdated hierarchies of knowledge that hamper new ways of seeing in the Humanities, and devalue whole traditions of human experience.
For the pre-circulated reading, please click here for access to the Google Drive.
Please let us know if you require an accommodation in order to participate in this event. Accommodations may include live captioning, ASL interpreters, and/or captioned media and accessible documents from recorded events. At least 5 days in advance is recommended.