Ch\u00e8res et chers coll\u00e8gues,<\/p>\n
Pour le prochain s\u00e9minaire SEARCH\/IUF sur l\u2019imagination spatiale aux Etats-Unis, nous aurons le plaisir d’accueillir MICHAEL DOCHERTY (Universit\u00e9 d’Innsbruck) avec une communication intitul\u00e9e \u201cImagining Elsewhere: Space, Possibility, and California in African American Fiction\u201d <\/strong>levendredi 27 octobre \u00e0 10h dans la salle de la table ronde de la Maison interuniversitaire des sciences de l\u2019homme d’Alsace, Universit\u00e9 de Strasbourg.<\/p>\n Abstract. In 1902, Black newspaper editor Jefferson Edmonds triumphantly declared California \u201cthe greatest state for the Negro,\u201d and the promise of an integrated El Dorado indeed renewed its appeal to successive generations of Black migrants from emancipation to World War II. By the 1960s, California had established itself as a hub of radical African American politics, a place to imagine Black futures. Yet California is also the state of the Watts Rebellion and Rodney King, of the most restrictive historical redlining practices in the nation, of Bobby Hutton shot down with his hands up. This talk will explore how Black writers of fiction have considered the Janus-faced role that California has played in the history of African American life, demonstrating the central but understudied role played by California in the African American literary imagination\u2014as a speculatory space where alternative possibilities for Black existence can be hypothesized and, perhaps, made real.<\/p>\n Post-1960s African American fiction, this talk will argue, responds both to California\u2019s contested and ambiguous role in histories of African American liberation and to a dichotomous sense of extreme possibility (at once utopian and apocalyptic) that defines the cultural construction of California. For authors from Ishmael Reed to Wanda Coleman, Al Young to Dana Johnson, California enables new ways of thinking about Blackness. Though their approaches and conclusions differ, these writers share a sense that California\u2019s unique spatial imaginary provokes new possibilities in the U.S. racial imaginary: as the symbolic last frontier, a vision of both American triumph and American tragedy, California is built upon a conviction that meanings of space are intrinsically and insolubly contestable. Exactly that contest is taken up by California\u2019s contemporary Black authors. Apprehending a place whose role in American self-narrative has always <\/em>been uncertain, they ask why that role might not be as a fulfilment of Black possibility, an inexhaustible elsewhere.<\/p>\n Bio. Michael Docherty is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Innsbruck. His research primarily considers how California has been constructed in American (and indeed global) imaginaries, and how fiction has both shaped and been shaped by California\u2019s unique spatial, racial, and cultural histories. Michael\u2019s work has appeared in Crime Fiction Studies<\/em>, Textual Practice,Comparative American Studies<\/em>, the Los Angeles Review of Books<\/em>, and Post45 Contemporaries, which he also co-edits. His first book, The Recursive Frontier: Race, Space, and the Literary Imagination of Los Angeles, will be published in April 2024 by SUNY Press, and he is currently co-editing Los Angeles: A Literary History <\/em>for Cambridge University Press. Michael\u2019s second monograph, in progress, is titled Black Horizons: African American Literature and the Possibility of California.<\/p>\n Bien cordialement,<\/p>\n Monica Manolescu<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ch\u00e8res et chers coll\u00e8gues, Pour le prochain s\u00e9minaire SEARCH\/IUF sur l\u2019imagination spatiale aux Etats-Unis, nous aurons le plaisir d’accueillir MICHAEL 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