"Stealing the Future: Black Childhood and the Ecological Imagination"

Samira Abdur-Rahman, University of San Francisco

Humanities Center, Conference Room D

In this lecture, Dr. Abdur-Rahman will discuss the role of childhood in Black writers and artists’ imagining of place, ecology, and race since the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Through interrogation of discourses of “post civil rights” and “post-racialism,” Dr. Abdur-Rahman will explore the import of childhood and youth centered literature, art, and cultural productions to the creation of a radical narrative about Black ecological thought and activism.

Dr. Abdur-Rahman will offer readings of June Jordan’s Dry Victories (1971) and His Own Where (1972) and James Baldwins’ Little Man Little Man (1976) to highlight how both writers used children’s literature to engage with the specific environmental issues faced by Black people in the urban North.

Sponsored by the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies. For more information contact us at (585) 276-5744 or fdi@rochester.edu.