Faculty Highlight

Stowe Prize 2021, honoring Dr. Eddie Glaude, for his book, Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own.

Arguably, no writer has ever made that demand more forcefully, passionately, or eloquently than James Baldwin. More than 33 years since his death at age 63, Baldwin continues to give voice to our times.

In the wake of Covid-19 and uprisings in response to a climate of anti-blackness, join us for a conversation about time, temporality, and Black life: how time is racialized, how race is temporalized and how time is wielded as a tool of racialized violence. Why are some able to use time, while others are largely used and abused by it? Why is it that some are able to own time, while others can only owe it? Together, let us make time to think about what it might look like to move from liberal to liberatory futurities. 

When Ruha Benjamin was 14, she moved from South Carolina to the South Pacific with her parents, educators tasked with curriculum development and teacher training in Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands. To keep the family entertained, her father brought boxes of VHS tapes filled with “Star Trek” episodes.