The 9th Proseminar in Humanistic Social Scientific Inquiry presents the 6th event on the theme of Who the People: Punctuating Politics in the USA, Being America in the World
Professors Wesley Brown and Kristy McMorris
Bard College at Simon’s Rock
About the speakers
Prof. Wesley Brown, Visiting Professor in African American Studies at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, is the author of three novels, as well as three produced plays. He is the co-editor of a fiction multicultural anthology Imagining America and a nonfiction multicultural anthology Visions of America, and he is editor of The Teachers & Writers Guide to Frederick Douglass. He received an MA in Literature & Creative Writing from The City College of the City University of New York, and a BA in History & Political Science from State University of New York, Oswego. He is Professor Emeritus in English at Rutgers University (1979-2005) and was a Visiting Writer at Sarah Lawrence College in 2015. Prof. Brown came to Simon's Rock in 2007. Some of his works include: Dance of the Infidels, short story collection (forthcoming); Dark Meat on a Funny Mind, play (Nuyorican Poets Cafe, 2014); Push Comes to Shove, novel (2009); A Prophet Among Them, play (Blue Heron Theatre, 2001); Darktown Strutters, novel (1994); Life During Wartime, play (Nuyorican Poets Cafe, 1992); Boogie Woogie and Booker T, play (New Federal Theatre, 1987); and Tragic Magic, novel (1978).
Prof. Kristy McMorris, Bard Fellow (2016-18) and Visiting Faculty in Languages and Literature at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, and Faculty in Literature at Bard High School Early College in Queens, is also the Founding Director of the Bard Early College at Harlem Children's Zone Promise Academy, as well as an Associate for the Institute of Writing and Thinking at Bard College. She received her Ph.D from New York University, and works in Contemporary African American and Caribbean literature, Black feminist theory, and Postcolonial criticism.
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The Division of Social Studies presents the Fall 2016 Proseminar in Humanistic and Social Scientific Inquiry on the theme of "Who the People: Punctuating Politics in the USA, Being “America" in the World." This Fall, we engage with questions of the vitality, legitimacy, promise, im/possibility of democratic life that haunt one of the largest democracies in the world, which is also, indeed, one of the largest global imperial powers. How do the frames of polis, nation-state, colony, and postcolony intersect in the United States of America, and how are we to understand the people that fill out or outline these enclosures? What are the self-conceptions and proclamations, indeed also sighs and laments, of “the people” enclosed within these frames, and how do they impact the claims the people are able to make with regard to the meaning of politics, the political process, participation, and possibility--and indeed the very possibility of life within and without the polity. What must a transdisciplinary and decolonial inquiry into these matters of life and death look like, where does and must it happen, who does and must undertake it--and what affects and actions must it seek to enable and disable in us?