Join this year's CLCT Common Seminar Instructor, Professor Christel Temple of Africana Studies, in a related lecture related to her seminar theme, Excavating Memory from an Africana Aesthetic. She describes her presentation: "When Larry Neal, a key author and philosopher of the Black Arts and Black Aesthetic Movements of the 1960s and 1970s, contributed 'Some Reflections on the Black Aesthetic' as Chapter Two to Addison Gayle’s seminal collection The Black Aesthetic (1971), it seemed to be simply a four-page, non-narrative T-chart. In its brief, two-sentence introduction, Neal described it as 'a rough overview.' Its most repeated key words were mythology, memory, myth, and aesthetics. Neal hinted at a future 'larger essay that would tie them all together.' By following Neal’s conceptual breadcrumbs, the discipline of Africana Studies and adjacent academic partners have identified an elaborate intellectual tradition that stabilizes the emergent subfield of Africana cultural memory studies."

CLST Director Professor Ronald J. Zboray will introduce the speaker and rollout CLST's Spring 2022 offerings.

Question and answer from the the online audience will follow Professor Temple's lecture.

Register in advance for this meeting:

https://pitt.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwoc-6hrjIvHtxEjVQ6kHGFv-kGiFf_vc9R

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Christel N. Temple is Professor of Africana Studies and an affiliate of The Graduate Program for Cultural Studies (CLST), the Critical European Culture Studies doctoral program (CED), and the African Studies Program (ASP).  Professor Temple received her B.A. from the College of William and Mary, where she majored in History, her M.A. in Comparative Black Literature from the University of Maryland Baltimore County, and her Ph.D. in African American Studies from Temple University.  Her major fields of interest are Africana Cultural Memory Studies, Comparative Africana Literature, Black Nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and Afroeuropean Studies.  She has published widely on issues of Diaspora cultural theory and Africana literary history and criticism.

Temple is the author of Black Cultural Mythology (SUNY, 2020),Transcendence and the Africana Literary Enterprise (Lexington, 2017), Literary Spaces: Introduction to Comparative Black Literature (Carolina Academic Press, 2007), and Literary Pan-Africanism: History, Contexts, and Criticism (Carolina Academic Press, 2005). She has a forthcoming collection on Muhammad Ali in Africana Cultural Memory (Anthem, 2021) co-edited with James L. Conyers, Jr.  Read more