Event overview
Goldsmiths Literature Seminar
Season Butler, PhD candidate, Goldsmiths
In this paper I will discuss why writers should diligently mark race in literature, even when race is not a central theme in the story. Fiction too often omits any description of race, and this, I assert, passively segregates literary space and denies self-recognition to non-white readers. Are writers reproducing in fiction the same inequalities which in society we purport to abhor through the unconscious adherence to taboos and conventions concerning race in writing?
I'm aiming to create literary worlds where race is visible, but where white oppression is not always at the centre of the Black psyche. I will consider what an absence of self-recognition does to the reader of colour through Lacan's a Cixous' writings on The Mirror Stage, (Mis)Recognition and the establishment of Subject status, towards the idea that a caesura of the bond between Black subjectivity and white oppression as central psychic conflict might be a route to achieving hitherto denied Subject status.
Looking at Zadie Smith's NW, James Baldwin's “raceless” novel about sexuality and identity, Giovanni's Room, and Suzanne Collins's young adult trilogy about class conflict, The Hunger Games, I will discuss strategies I've adopted to make race visible in my own writing.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 17 Oct 2013 | 6:30pm - 8:00pm |
Accessibility
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