Center for Indigenous Studies Presents

Namwali Serpell: “Unnoticed and as Beautiful: The Native American Figure in Toni Morrison’s Literature”

Scholars have been concerned either to criticize or to praise Morrison’s sparing inclusion of Native Americans in her novels. Are they beneath her notice? Or have they gone unnoticed by us? Following Morrison’s own methods in arguing that the “real or fabricated” “Africanist presence” in white American literature is crucial to writers’ “sense of Americanness,” we might pursue how the “Native American presence” works in her literature not only in historical and political terms, but also in aesthetic and cultural terms. This talk considers how, across her oeuvre and career, the Native American figure—meaning literary character; racial type; literary trope; and silhouette or profile—shapes her “sense of blackness.”

A reception catered by Samosa Shack Kingston to follow talk beginning at 4:30pm.

This event is the 2024 lecture of the Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck Toni Morrison lecture series.

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Namwali Serpell is a Zambian writer and a Professor of English at Harvard University. She received a 2020 Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction, the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing, and a 2011 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and was selected for the Africa39. Her first novel, The Old Drift (Hogarth, 2019), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book prize, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction, the Grand Prix des Associations Littéraires Prize for Belles-Lettres, and the L.A. Times’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. It was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2019 by the New York Times Book Review and one of Time’s 100 Must-Read Books of the Year. Her novel, The Furrows: An Elegy (Hogarth, 2022), was long listed for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize and the Carol Shields Award for fiction, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the California Book Award for Fiction. It was named one of the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2022, and one of President Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year. Her nonfiction book, Stranger Faces (Transit, 2020), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.

For more information, call 845-758-6822,
or visit https://rethinkingplace.bard.edu/namwali-serpell/.

Time: 3:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: Olin Auditorium

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