Thursday, February 9th, 2023 The Dishonored Community: Black Deviants in Urban America with Khaleel Grant

Description

Throughout the 20th century, New York was a hub of Black politics. From Garveyites to Black Communists, Civil Rights activists to Black Panthers, almost every conceivable political movement among African Americans was present in NYC. This lecture focuses on none of these movements or their notable figures. Instead, it discusses dishonored communities of Black subjects who operated in the fringes, slums, and undergrounds of post-WWII New York City. Whether they were drug-dealing grandmothers, "junkies" plaguing neighborhoods, juvenile delinquents, or outright thieves, these figures were engaged in a practice of Black deviance that has seldom been considered "political" or related to traditions of Black protest or radicalism. Drawing on a selection of primary sources, Grant will explore the complexity of Black deviant subjectivity, deviant and dishonored communal living, and the potential of unearthing a Black Deviant Tradition.  

Speaker Bio:

Khaleel Grant is a Ph.D. candidate in history with a collaborative specialization in women and gender studies (CWGS) at the Women and Gender Studies Institute. Their areas of study include gender, slavery, and racial capitalism in North America and the Caribbean and the 20th-century history of the Black radical tradition in the U.S. and African Diaspora. Their doctoral research seeks to understand how various Black social movements’ notions of class, respectability, and revolutionary potential excluded specific segments of their respective communities. Khaleel’s work examines deviant practices among Black urban poor communities as an alternative to conventional politics to understand how they escaped, contested, survived, or exploited the precarity and circumscribed freedom of liberal democracy and racial capitalism. Their work suggests that Black deviance perhaps constitutes a political or anti-political tradition on its own terms.