Please join the Affect and the Emotions Workshop
on Monday, February 10, when
Bellamy Mitchell
PhD Candidate
Social Thought and English
University of Chicago
presents the paper:
“’In spite of our knowledge of our own meanings’:
Apologies and Racial Fragility in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Citizen: An American Lyric”
Monday, February 10 | Social Science Research 302 | 4:30-6pm
Respondent: Jennifer Scappettone, English, Romance Languages and Literatures, Creative Writing, and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality
Description: This paper examines apologies from two different documentary literary works, James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1936) and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014). Both texts expose the apology as a form which not only promises closure and redress, but which raises complex problems related to the differential experiences of embarrassment, discomfort, and harm which occur on each side of a racialized encounter.
The paper, to be read in advance, will be distributed to the Affect and the Emotions Workshop mailing list and is available in the post below with a password. Light refreshments will be served.
We are committed to making our sessions accessible to all persons. Questions, requests, or concerns may be directed to the coordinator by email. To join our mailing list, please click here.
Image: Jeff Wall. Mimic, 1982.
