Jayna Brown: Meditations on Black Feminism

Professor Jayna Brown is Chair of the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University. She is the author of two books, both published by Duke University Press: Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (2008) and Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (2021). She has also published numerous essays and is co-editor of the journal Social Text. Her areas of research and specialisation include speculative fictions, music, queer studies, black feminism, black diasporan intellectual history, and our changing media landscape. Her current work is located at the intersections of speculative fiction, ecology, and black expressive cultures.

Dr Christine Okoth is Lecturer in Literatures and Cultures of the Black Atlantic in the Department of English, King’s College London. She is primarily concerned with questions of environment and race in contemporary Black literature and visual art, and is currently working on a book project entitled Race and the Raw Material. A second research project considers how contemporary literature and art from the Caribbean, East Africa, and North America looks back onto histories of resource nationalism, de-linking, and other attempts at refusing the integrating gestures of global trade. Her research has been published in Modern Fiction Studies, Textual Practice, and The Cambridge Quarterly.

Header image: Howardena Pindell, Yes–No, 1979. Published in Howardena Pindell, “Criticisms/or/Between the Lines,” special issue, “Third World Women—The Politics of Being Other,” Heresies, no. 8 (1979).

An event organised by UCL English and the UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation