Please join us for the inaugural event of The Black Outdoors speaker series and working group, featuring Fred Moten (UC Riverside) and Saidiya Hartman (Columbia) in conversation with J. Kameron Carter (Duke Divinity School) and Sarah Jane Cervenak (UNC Greensboro).

Co-convened by Carter and Cervenak, The Black Outdoors: Humanities Futures after Property and Possession seeks to interrogate the relation between race, sexuality, and juridical and theological ideas of self-possession, often evidenced by the couplet of land-ownership and self-regulation, a couplet predicated on settler colonialism and historically racist, sexist, homophobic and classist ideas of bodies fit for (self-)governance. The title of the working group and speaker series points up the ways blackness figures as always outside the state, unsettled, unhomed, and unmoored from sovereignty in its doubled-form of aggressively white discourses on legitimate citizenship on one hand and the public/private divide itself on the other. The project will address questions of  the "black outdoors" in relationship to literary, legal, theological, philosophical, and artistic works, especially poetry and visual arts.