He is alive because the world is dead.
Acclaimed screen and stage actor André Holland (Moonlight, Passing, Jitney) reads Saidiya Hartman’s The End of White Supremacy: An American Romance, a dramatic monologue that retells—and riffs on—W.E.B. Du Bois’s “The Comet,” a work of speculative fiction that imagines how it might be possible to nurture “a hope not hopeless, even if unhopeful” after environmental catastrophe befalls New York City and (temporarily) breaks the stranglehold of racism.
Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2019. Her work is “gorgeous and heartbreaking,” writes Daphne A. Brooks. “It is scholarship as art imbued with a kind of discursive simultaneity that yields both eulogy and possibility.”
The live reading will be followed by a talk-back with Hartman and Holland.
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