The Matter of Black Lives

The Black Lives Matter movement has reignited public debates about racism, police violence, and ‘racial’ inequality in the Anglophone world. Taking our cue from a recent anthology of writing on ‘race’ titled The Matter of Black Lives, this seminar approaches theoretical and literary interventions into the societal phenomenon of racism with a sustained focus on the material dimension of black lives. To give an example of what this might mean conceptually, Cedric Johnson’s After Black Lives Matter – Policing and Anti-Capitalist Struggle (2023) is a helpful starting point. Johnson “grounds the origins and central dynamics of the contemporary carceral regime within the social contradictions of capitalism” (19), foregrounding the “fundamental class character” of both ‘racial’ inequality and racist policing (20). Accordingly, we will explore the ways in which both theory and literature map, accentuate and/or override the class dimension of black lives.

Our survey of theory will span Anglo-American approaches to ‘race’, with a particular focus on contributions that theorise the connection between racism and capitalism, such as works that build on the notion of ‘racial capitalism’ put forward by Cedric Robinson. In terms of literary texts, we will confine ourselves to the genre of poetry, with a focus on works by poets rooted in the Anglosphere. Poems that tackle the materialities of black lives in responding to the Grenfell Tower Fire of 2017 will be of particular interest to us. However, our survey of theoretical approaches may also be accompanied by readings of poetic texts from both sides of the Atlantic and the turn of the millennium.