CURRENTS: La Marr Jurelle Bruce and Tracy Tinga

CURRENTS: Humanities Work Now is lunchtime series that showcases exciting new faculty work in the humanities in a dynamic and inter-disciplinary setting.

The Afromantic

La Marr Jurelle Bruce, Associate Professor, American Studies, University of Maryland-College Park; Inclusion Imperative Visiting Faculty Fellow (Fall 2021)

This presentation will sketch the broad contours of “The Afromantic,” La Marr Jurelle Bruce’s current work-in-progress. “The Afromantic,” asBruce conceives it, is an existential attitude, aesthetic commitment, affective mode, critical hermeneutic, and way of life that honors deep sorrow (in light of the grief that often assails black life), even as it is driven by ecstatic feeling, utopic dreaming, and a will to joy. Traversing twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, theater, music, sports, religiosity, and quotidian life in the Anglophone United States, Caribbean, and South Africa, Bruce will explore Afromantic inflections in black life and lives. Ultimately, this project will unfurl a cultural history, critical theory, aesthetic expression, and existential assertion of black joy amid antiblackness.

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The Roles of Digital Media in the Discursive Construction of "Africanity"

Tracy Tinga, Assistant Professor, Media and Communication Studies

This presentation will examine how the growth of “Afrocentric” digital platforms in the last decade has and continues to influence and decolonize discourses about African countries and identity.

Image description: Side by side photos - On the left, a man with an afro is wearing a white shirt. On the right, a woman with short hair smiles at the camera.