The African American Literature and Culture Now symposium brings together a group of leading scholars in African American humanistic fields to identify and discuss the central questions that animate 21st-century Black Studies.

Prof. Stephen Best (Berkeley), author of None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life (Duke, 2018) and The Fugitive's Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (U of Chicago Pree, 2004), will deliver the keynote lecture of the symposium, titled "The End of Black Studies."

The End of Black Studies

This talk will address the dual ends of black studies—that is, the way the field's conditions of origin (think of Richard Wright’s White Man, Listen!) are always bound up with a sense of the field's imminent exhaustion, if not inutility (What project remains once he does?). These conflicting ends are a kind of Gordian knot with which the black scholar of black studies cannot fail to grapple—the question of how far “to define Black people as reactions to White presence,” as Toni Morrison once put it, never completely beyond the horizon of debate. And where Morrison redefined black studies, freeing black writing from the imperative of having to address a white reader, those changes could never quite accommodate James Baldwin, whose work fell into some disfavor upon his death in 1987. This talk will frame the recent resurgent interest in Baldwin in terms of an aesthetic turn within black studies, arguing that his invocations of the category of “beauty,” while not a clean cutting of the Gordian knot, offer a means of grappling with origins, both one's own and that of the field.