Grotesque Intimacies: Gender, Violence, and the Plantation Imaginary Book Presentation and Q&A with Author
Wednesday, May 10, 2023 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm EDT/GMT-4W15 Cafe
Dr. Amy King will present and facilitate discussion about research from her latest book, Grotesque Touch: Women, Violence, and Contemporary Circum-Caribbean Narratives (University of North Carolina Press, 2021), which examines how violence between women in contemporary Caribbean and American texts is rooted in plantation slavery.
Analyzing films, television shows, novels, short stories, poems, book covers, and paintings, King shows how contemporary media reuse salacious and stereotypical depictions of relationships between women living within the plantation system to confront its legacy in the present. The vestiges of these relationships--enslavers and enslaved women, employers and domestic servants, lovers and rivals--negate characters' efforts to imagine non-abusive approaches to power and agency. King's work goes beyond any other study to date to examine the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, ability, and nationality in U.S. and Caribbean depictions of violence between women in the wake of slavery.
To attend, please register via email to [email protected].
Speakers:
Amy K. King is an assistant professor of English at Tuskegee University. She specializes in circum-Atlantic studies, focusing on the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, ability, and nationality in contemporary written, visual, and audiovisual media. King’s first book, Grotesque Touch (UNC Press 2021), examines how violence between women in recent Caribbean and American texts is rooted in plantation slavery. Her work has recently appeared in the journals The Global South, Women’s Studies, south, and Mississippi Quarterly. Additionally, King enjoys collaborative projects and scholarship—In 2019, she co-wrote the feature “South to The Plantationocene” with Natalie Aikens, Amy Clukey, and Isadora Wagner for ASAP/J. King also co-edited the two-part forum “Emergent Critical Analytics for Alternative Humanities” with Chris A. Eng for Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association (2016, 2017), which features a call-and-response between established and emergent American Studies scholars.
Dr. Rhonda Collier is a Professor of Modern Languages and Communication at Tuskegee University in Tuskegee, Alabama, USA, where she also serves as the Director of the TU Global Office. She has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Vanderbilt University, and she is a Fulbright Scholar, who studied at the Universidad de São Paulo in Brazil. She has published in the areas of Afro-Brazilian, Afro-Cuban, African-American, and global hip hop studies. At Tuskegee University, she focuses on American literature, Black American literature, and composition courses with an emphasis on service-learning. Her most recent work, Culturally Responsive Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, co-edited with Dr. Octavia Tripp was released by IG Global Publishing on August 12, 2019. She is an expert in the area of publicly engaged humanities and has several projects in the area of civic engagement. She is an 2022 Affiliate Fellow for the American Academy of Rome and currently working on a project on Afro-Italian Literature and Art as narratives of freedom. Dr. Collier is passionate about education abroad and cross-cultural student engagement.