Description

Historian and organizer Garrett Felber, Visiting Faculty Fellow at Yale University, discussed abolitionist lessons from his biography-in-progress of Black Puerto Rican anarchist and former U.S. political prisoner Martin Sostre. First as a politicized prisoner and jailhouse lawyer, and later as a political prisoner who was framed during the 1967 Buffalo rebellion while running a radical bookstore, Sostre embodied the dialectical transformations between self and society which led him to lead a life of “continuous struggle.” Sostre creatively adapted law, solitary confinement, surveillance, and organized abandonment to disrupt state violence and create life-affirming communities. His ideas and deeds formed architectures of resistance within the scaffolding of an oppressive state that provide a variety of illustrations for movements organizing within, against, and beyond it today.

Speakers Bios:

Garrett Felber, Yale University

Garrett Felber received his B.A. in English from Kalamazoo College, a M.A. in African American Studies from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is an interdisciplinary historian whose work focuses on 20th-century social movements, the Black radical tradition, and the carceral state. Felber’s Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State (UNC Press, 2020) received the Merle Curti Intellectual History Award from the Organization of American Historians and was a finalist for the Museum of African American History’s Stone Book Award and the African American Intellectual History Society’s Pauli Murray Book Award. He is co-author of The Portable Malcolm X Reader (Penguin 2013) with Manning Marable and has published articles in the Journal of American History, Journal of African American History, Journal of Social History, Souls, and South African Music Studies.

Brett Story, Ryerson University

Brett Story is a geographer and award-winning non-fiction filmmaker. Her films have screened at True/False, Oberhausen, Hot Docs, the Viennale, and Dok Leipzig, among other international festivals. Her second feature-length film, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016) was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and was a nominee for Best Canadian Feature Documentary at the Canadian Screen Awards. Her interests across the fields of documentary and critical theory are expansive, and include experimental cinema and essay films, politics and aesthetics, racial capitalism and Marxist political economy, and visual geography. Brett holds a PhD in geography from the University of Toronto and is the author of a forthcoming book titled Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America from the University of Minnesota Press. She was a 2016 Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow and is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow.

Max Mishler, University of Toronto, History Department and the Center for the Study of the United States. Mishler specializes in the transnational history of the United States, with a focus on slavery and abolition, incarceration, and the history of capitalism.

Sponsored by the Centre for the Study of the United States.

Description

Gustavus Stadler’s Woody Guthrie: An Intimate Life is a new biography of the storied folk singer and icon of the Popular Front Left, one that does the work of disentangling him from myth and setting him down amid the messy, contradictory, human struggles of his day: “an expansive and strikingly unique portrait,” as the Los Angeles Review of Books recently put it, “of a man, not of an immortal legend.” The book also functions as a kind of intimate history of the Left, tracking the definitive importance for Guthrie of a series of dilemmas — about illness and shame, pain and joy as they are experienced through the body, intimacy as a crucible for solidarity — that suggest a greater continuity between Old and New Lefts than we are used to acknowledging.

Join us for a conversation about the book, these issues, and more, between Stadler and eminent historian of U. S. music David Suisman.

—Speaker Bios—
Gustavus Stadler is William R. Kenan Professor and Chair of English at Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania, where he directs the John B. Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities. In addition to Woody Guthrie: An Intimate Life (Beacon Press, 2020), he is the author of Troubling Minds: The Cultural Politics of Genius in the U. S. 1840-1890 (U of Minnesota Press, 2006). He has published essays on U. S. literature, music, and politics in such venues as Al Jazeera, Public Books, Avidly.com, and Social Text.

David Suisman is associate professor of history at the University of Delaware, where he specializes in cultural history, the history of music, sound studies, war and society, and the history of capitalism. His books include Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Harvard University Press, 2009), recipient of numerous awards and honors, and Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), co-edited with Susan Strasser. His articles and reviews have appeared in the Journal of American History, Social Text, Radical History Review, The Believer, American Historical Review, Journal of Social History, and other publications. From 2010 to 2021, he was associate editor and book review editor of the Journal of Popular Music Studies. A sometime disc jockey at freeform radio station WFMU, he lives in Philadelphia.

Description

Excerpted from my forthcoming book, Mud, Blood, and Ghosts: Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism 1870-1930, “Blood” traces my great-grandfather, the Populist Congressman from Nebraska, Omer Madison Kem, in his avid adoption of eugenics as he expressed it throughout the extensive archive he left behind. Focusing on blood as a symbolic marker of value (class, race, and strength) and of bodily vulnerability at once, I explore the concept of blood contamination running through segregationist policies, eugenics, and the anti-immigration crusades of the 1910s and ‘20s. As my own family participated in and benefited from these ideologies, I explore this history from a sense of deep implication, tracing the inexhaustible threads of invitation and rejection, belonging and barrier, weaving through my family’s history and all of our lives now.

—Speaker Bio—
Julie Carr is the author of 10 books of poetry and prose, including Real Life: An Installation, Objects from a Borrowed Confession, and a book of essays, Someone Shot my Book. Earlier books include 100 Notes on Violence, soon to be reissued, RAG, and Think Tank. With Jeffrey Robinson she is the co-editor of Active Romanticism (University of Alabama Press, 2015). Her co-translation of Leslie Kaplan’s Excess-The Factory was published by Commune Editions in 2018. Climate, a book of epistolary essays written with the poet Lisa Olstein, is forthcoming from Essay Press.

Carr was a 2011-12 NEA fellow and is a Professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder in English, Creative Writing, and the Intermedia Art Writing and Performance PhD. She is currently the Chair of the Women and Gender Studies Department. She has collaborated with dance artists K.J. Holmes and Gesel Mason. With Tim Roberts she is the co-founder of Counterpath Press, Counterpath Gallery, and Counterpath Community Garden in Denver. Www.reallifeaninstallation.com; www.juliecarrpoet.com;www.counterpathpress.org

— Respondent Bio—
Dr. Cristina Rivera Garza is the award-winning author of six novels, three collections of short stories, five collections of poetry and three non-fiction books. Originally written in Spanish, these works have been translated into multiple languages, including English, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Korean. The recipient of the Roger Caillois Award for Latin American Literature (Paris, 2013); as well as the Anna Seghers (Berlin, 2005), she is the only author who has won the International Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize twice, in 2001 for her novel Nadie me verá llorar (translated into English by Andrew Hurley as No One Will See Me Cry ) and again in 2009 for her novel La muerte me da. In 2020, she received a MacArthur Fellowship.
The Restless Dead, her most recent book of criticism, comparatively explores the contemporary discussions surrounding conceptualist writing in the United States, post-exoticism in France, as well as communally-based writing throughout the Americas.
She was born in Mexico (Matamoros, Tamaulipas, 1964), and has lived in the United States since 1989.