Special Session of READS
Nationwide protests in solidarity with the Movement for Black Lives have brought renewed attention to the necessity of anti-racist work in every facet of American life. Anti-racist reading lists or syllabi are increasingly prevalent, but as Lauren Michele Jackson reminds us in a recent contribution to Vulture, “What Is an Anti-Racist Reading List For?”, these rich lists of texts cannot do the work on their own: “someone at some point has to get down to the business of reading.”
As one step towards an anti-racist restructuring of our field and our communities, Eos challenges scholars, teachers, and students in Classics “to get down to the business of reading.” On Friday, October 16th, 2020, we will host a virtual extraordinary session of READS. In keeping with previous sessions, this workshop will gather Eos members to discuss selections of seminal African diasporic texts. We have chosen selections from “Concerning Violence” in Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and Margo Hendricks’ “Coloring the Past, Rewriting Our Future: RaceB4Race” (2019).
But this moment demands more. And so, we have added a new element to this iteration of READS.
To attend the workshop, you must organize and participate in a discussion of these texts in your campus or community first. The special session of READS on October 16th will dedicate time to group discussion of the texts, to reflections on our conversations across our communities, and to considering this experiment and the historicity of these protests for Black lives.
Here is what you need to do:
Sign up: let us know you plan to participate!
Prepare: texts and discussion questions will be sent to registered participants on July 1st.
Host your own READS: recruit people to read and discuss these texts with you before we all meet in October.
Report back: we will ask where, when, and with whom your discussion happened. Once we have this information from you, we will share the Zoom link for the virtual session.
Join us for the big event on Friday, October 16th!