“Fugitive Movement: Queer Vulnerability in the Black Diasporic Imaginary”

In this talk, Avilez considers how social and geographic restrictions often constrain racial and sexual minorities and create conditions of vulnerability.  However, to what extent is vulnerability the dominant lens for articulating Black queer life? Avilez takes up this question by first exploring the contexts for queer vulnerability and then highlighting innovative methods for documenting queer life and desire. Using fiction and ethnographic works, he demonstrates how Black queer subjects creatively navigate assumed states of vulnerability to express agency within the context of restriction. 

GerShun Avilez is an Associate Professor in the Department of English & Comparative Literature and the Director of the Program in Sexuality Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is a cultural studies scholar who specializes in African American literature and visual culture, as well as the art of the Black Diaspora. He is the author of the book Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism (Illinois), which won the 2017 William Sanders Scarborough Prize, given by the Modern Language Association for an outstanding scholarly study of African American literature or culture. Currently, he is completing a new book on spatial concerns in Black literary culture and social history and co-editing a special issue of the journal Women's Studies. 

Free and open to the public

This is the second talk in the 2018-19 African American Studies Speaker Series, sponsored by the Department of English and College of Arts and Sciences.