The Department of African American Studies is excited to welcome La Marr Jurelle Bruce from the Department of American Studies and University Honors to speak for one of the Fall 2022 Brown Bag events. This presentation introduces a work-in-progress called The Afromantic. Afromance is a structure of feeling and way of life that centers sorrow—honoring the grief that often haunts blackness—even as it is driven by ecstatic feeling, utopic dreaming, and a will to love. Traversing twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, theater, music, sports, religiosity, and the everyday in the United States, Caribbean, and South Africa, I plan to explore Afromantic inflections in black life and lives. Ultimately, this project will unfurl a cultural history, critical theory, aesthetic expression, and existential assertion of black love and joy against antiblackness.

To attend the event, click on the following link: https://go.umd.edu/TheAfromantic

"La Marr Jurelle Bruce earned his BA in African American Studies and English & Comparative Literature from Columbia University and his PhD in African American Studies and American Studies from Yale University. An interdisciplinary humanities scholar, Dr. Bruce is appointed in the Department of American Studies and affiliated with the Departments of African American Studies, Theatre and Performance Studies, and Women’s Studies at UMD. His areas of interest and expertise include Africana literature and performance, US popular culture, queer theory, psychoanalysis, mad studies, and especially the art and aesthetics of quotidian black life.

Winner of the 2014 Joe Weixlmann Award from African American Review, he has also published work in American Quarterly, The Black Scholar, GLQ, Social Text, TDR, and elsewhere. His first book, How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity (forthcoming from Duke University Press), is a study of black artists who mobilize madness in radical literature and performance. His second project, The Afromantic, will generate a cultural history, critical theory, and existential expression of black joy and love amid antiblackness."

(Source Credit: University Honors)

(Photo Credit: https://www.vectorstock.com/royalty-free-vectors/vectors-by_OneLinePrint)