Emily Greenwood’s opening talk for Collective Protest and Rebellion: A CAAPP Black Study Intensive, shows us how, without our knowing, the language we take up can have a trail of repression. But, there’s hope. “Overthrowing Deadly Metaphors” takes a single Greek phrase that has a long and difficult entanglement in American racial slavery and that is still very much of our moment, and shows how various black authors give us the tools to dismantle and subvert this phrase. This event is co-presented with the University of Pittsburgh’s Humanities Center and will be moderated by Dan Kubis, Senior Lecturer in the Department of English.

A leading figure in her intersecting fields, Emily Greenwood is Professor of Classics and African American Studies at Yale University. She specializes in ancient Greek literature and responses to ancient Greece and Rome in Black traditions. Her publications include Afro-Greeks: Dialogues Between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century (2010), and Thucydides and the Shaping of History (2006). Her current book project is entitled Black Classicisms and the Expansion of the Classical Tradition.

The Center for African American Poetry and Poetics’ (CAAPP) week-long Black Study Intensive, “Collective Protest & Rebellion,” features poet/essayist/novelist Dionne Brand, filmmaker Charles Burnett, filmmaker Julie Dash, poet/performer/composer JJJJJerome Ellis, poet Aracelis Girmay, scholar Emily Greenwood, writer/cultural historian Saidiya Hartman, poet/scholar Erica Hunt, interdisciplinary theater artist Daniel Alexander Jones­, photographer Zun Lee, poet/scholar Harryette Mullen, and poet Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon as a way to think in creativity toward collective agency and social change. With urgency, we look toward the 2020/2021 academic year as an opportunity to, in Fred Moten’s sense of the word, “study” together, what he sometimes calls talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. This week we come together to engage in black study in community during this time of upheaval and repair. It is here where we seek innovative discovery in the act of creating as productive of new knowledges that help change the world. We hope you’ll join us for the entire week!

CAAPP’s programming is made possible by the generous support of the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of the Arts & Sciences and The Dietrich Foundation.

“Overthrowing Deadly Metaphors,” featuring Yale scholar Emily Greenwood by the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics