This lecture, which is part of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry and was held December 2, explores the doctrine of discovery that haunts American poetry.... Read more about Video: White Whales, White Males, Whitehead with Lisa Jarnot

This panel discussion of "The Religion of White Rage" was held November 2 with the book’s three editors, as part of the Center for the Study of World Religion's series on “Race, Religion, and Nationalism.” This book sheds light on the phenomenon of white rage, and maps out the uneasy relationship between white anxiety, religious fervor, American identity, and perceived black racial progress. Among other things, the book examines the sociological construct of the “white laborer,” whose concerns and beliefs, this book argues, can be understood as religious in foundation. The book argues further that white religious fervor correlates to notions of perceived white loss and perceived black progress.... Read more about Video: The Religion of White Rage

Fred Moten, a 2020 MacArthur Fellow, discussed a poem called "On Listening to the Two-Headed Lady Blow Her Horn," which is from Honorée Fanonne Jeffers's extraordinary collection, The Gospel of Barbecue. 

He talked—in the wake and under the influence of Manolo Callahan, J. Kameron Carter, Ruby Sales and Frank Stewart—about how the disruption of the metaphysics of sovereignty which the physics of the barbecue undertakes is held, and held open, and released in Jeffers's rich musicality. After failing properly to analyze a musicality that defies analysis, he...

The COVID-19 pandemic offers an opportunity to explore how religion and whiteness are interconnected. Where is religion in a president refusing to wear masks in public? What of whiteness in a governor suing one of its state’s own cities to prevent mask mandates?... Read more about Video: Spirits of Whiteness in the Age of COVID-19