March 18: Spring History Lecture to Examine Early African American Authors, Intergenerational Readers
Friday, March 18, 2022
4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Armstrong Hall 102
Mankato, Minn. – Minnesota State University, Mankato’s Department of History will host a presentation by University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty member Brigitte Fielder on Friday, March 18 at 4 p.m. titled “Early African American Authors and Intergenerational Readers: Old Technologies and Speculative Futures.”
The lecture is free and open to the public and will be held on campus in Armstrong Hall 102. The event will also be held virtually. A registration link for the virtual presentation is available at https://sbs.mnsu.edu/history-lecture-series.
For more information, contact Minnesota State Mankato’s Department of History at 507-389-2969.
Event preview provided by the Department of History:
“Early African American authors expressed hope and encouragement for a free future beyond themselves. 18th and 19th-century Black authors addressed intergenerational, reaching beyond any individual author’s scope to speculate about the future and to address the actual Black children who they acknowledged as part of their communities, among their potential readers, and as would-be beneficiaries of their work. When we consider print technologies among the larger scope of Black technoculture and theological discourse alongside other notions of the speculative, we can understand early Black community, literature and generational address as a form of (proto) Afrofuturism. The fullest understanding of Black literary sociality is generational in scale, extending Black print from producing Black community to imagining Black futurity.”
Short author biography provided by the Department of History:
Fielder is an associate professor at UW-Madison. She is the author of “Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America” (Duke University Press, 2020) and co-editor of “Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print” (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019).
Minnesota State Mankato’s Department of History is part of the University’s College of Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Minnesota State Mankato, a comprehensive university with 14,546 students, is part of the Minnesota State system, which includes 30 colleges and seven universities.
