“Like Orwell’s 1984 and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Adjei-Brenyah’s book presents a dystopian vision so upsetting and illuminating that it should permanently shift our understanding of who we are and what we’re capable of doing…So raw and tragic and primal is Chain-Gang All-Stars that despite its futuristic elements, it has the patina of some timeworn epic…Shockingly intimate and moving.”
—Washington Post

Selected by the New York Times as one of the best ten books of 2023: www.nytimes.com/2023/11/28/books/review/best-books-2023.html

The New York Times beststelling and awarded author Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah reads from his debut novel and is conversation with KU students.

Time and place: UA - 30, Dec 20, 2023, 6:00 pm CET

Via Zoom: https://kuei.zoom.us/j/68106271049?pwd=TGdITDRWNFNsakFqMUlnRjhkN1g4UT09

About the novel:

Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America’s increasingly dominant private prison industry. It’s the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom. In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs, competing in death-matches for packed arenas with righteous protestors at the gates. Thurwar and Staxxx, both teammates and lovers, are the fan favorites. And if all goes well, Thurwar will be free in just a few matches, a fact she carries as heavily as her lethal hammer. As she prepares to leave her fellow Links, she considers how she might help preserve their humanity, in defiance of these so-called games, but CAPE’s corporate owners will stop at nothing to protect their status quo and the obstacles they lay in Thurwar’s path have devastating consequences. Moving from the Links in the field to the protestors to the CAPE employees and beyond, Chain-Gang All-Stars is a kaleidoscopic, excoriating look at the American prison system’s unholy alliance of systemic racism, unchecked capitalism, and mass incarceration, and a clear-eyed reckoning with what freedom in this country really means from a “new and necessary American voice” (Tommy Orange, The New York Times Book Review).

About the author:

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is the author of the bestselling short story collection Friday Black and the novel Chain-Gang All-Stars. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including Guernica, Compose: A Journal of Simply Good Writing, Printer’s Row, Gravel, and The Breakwater Review, where he was selected by ZZ Packer as the winner of the 2nd Annual Breakwater Review Fiction Contest. He is from Spring Valley, New York. He graduated from SUNY Albany and went on to receive his MFA from Syracuse University.

Winner of the PEN America/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel

“A profound reflection on the intergenerational nature of cultural trauma… Hokeah’s characters exist at the intersection of Kiowa, Cherokee and Mexican identity, which provides a vital exploration of indigeneity in contemporary American letters.”
—The New York Times Book Review

Cherokee/Kiowa author Oscar Hokeah reads from his award winning debut novel and is in conversation with KU students.

Time and place: UA - 30, Nov 22, 2023, 6:00 pm

Via Zoom: kuei.zoom.us/j/68415569345

About the novel:

Oscar Hokeah’s electric debut takes us into the life of Ever Geimausaddle, whose family—part Mexican, part Native American—is determined to hold onto their community despite obstacles everywhere they turn. Ever’s father is injured at the hands of corrupt police on the border when he goes to visit family in Mexico, while his mother struggles both to keep her job and care for her husband. And young Ever is lost and angry at all that he doesn’t understand, at this world that seems to undermine his sense of safety. Ever’s relatives all have ideas about who he is and who he should be. His Cherokee grandmother, knowing the importance of proximity, urges the family to move across Oklahoma to be near her, while his grandfather, watching their traditions slip away, tries to reunite Ever with his heritage through traditional gourd dances. Through it all, every relative wants the same: to remind Ever of the rich and supportive communities that surround him, there to hold him tight, and for Ever to learn to take the strength given to him to save not only himself but also the next generation.

How will this young man visualize a place for himself when the world hasn’t made room for him to start with? Honest, heartbreaking, and ultimately uplifting, Calling for a Blanket Dance is the story of how Ever Geimausaddle finds his way home.

About the author:

Oscar Hokeah is a citizen of Cherokee Nation and the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma from his mother's side and has Mexican heritage through his father. He holds an MA in English with a concentration in Native American Literature from the University of Oklahoma, as well as a BFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), with a minor in Indigenous Liberal Studies. He is a recipient of the Truman Capote Scholarship Award through IAIA and is also a winner of the Native Writer Award through the Taos Summer Writers Conference. His short stories have been published in South Dakota Review, American Short Fiction, Yellow Medicine Review, Surreal South, and Red Ink Magazine. He works with Indian Child Welfare in Tahlequah.

Angela N Parker (Mercer, Atlanta), The Empire MUST Fail: Re-Imagining Black Ecological Futures with Paul's Creation Language in Romans 8

Keynote as part of the workshop “Ecologies in Black Liberation,” hosted by the DFG-Network “Bridging Black Freedom Struggles,”

Through a nuanced reading of Romans 8:18-24, Parker re-imagines what black ecological futures must entail as we engage Paul's language of solidarity with creation. In previous verses, Paul has shown solidarity across the family of God and other identities (including Creation). However, in taking Paul further, Parker asks how contemporary Jesus followers should move forward in these solidarities today? Can movements that claim to care for Creation ignore the continued "groaning" that Black Lives Matter? Further, how do movements bring about the failure of Empire so that marginalized Black bodies AND Creation experience transformation and move out of "groaning?" For all of this to happen, Empires must fail. How do we bring about that failure?

The workshop and the lecture are supported by the DFG and the BAA.

Scott Zukowski (Graz University) “Freedom’s Journal and the Reimagining of Human Hierarchies around the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic”

February 1, 2023, 10:30 am, KGA-102.

This project studies various genres of texts of Freedom’s Journal (the first Black-owned and operated newspaper in the US) that challenged racial, gendered, and geographic hierarchies prevalent in early nineteenth-century Euro-American culture. I analyze poetry, fiction, excerpts, witticisms, travel narratives, letters, and historical meditations—sometimes printed specifically for the Journal and sometimes reprinted from other sources—studying the way that the paper’s editors strategically anthologized writings from a variety of genres, countries, continents, cultures, and contexts, in order to present a radically different view of race, gender, and humanity: one that challenged and critiqued the customary Western hierarchy that identified white Euro-Americans as superior to people of color and other marginalized peoples.

Daniel Stein (Siegen University) “Confronting Monstrous Pasts in Walker, Brown, and Greene’s Comic Book Series Bitter Root”

December 9, 2022, 2 pm, UA-141.

Issues of Black history and representation have been at the forefront of US literature for many decades, but in the realm of comic book production, they were largely ignored for the longest time. This began to change with the publication of Tom Feelings’ haunting series of silent images about the Atlantic slave trade, The Middle Passage: White Ships, Black Cargo (1995) and with the mainstream appeal of Kyle Baker’s biography of the slave revolutionary, Nat Turner (2008), and Jeremy Love’s exploration of the Southern gothic in Bayou (2009/2010). Based on these early attempts to visualize the Black past, this talk analyzes the graphic depiction of African American history in the contemporary series Bitter Root (Walker, Brown, and Greene, Image Comics, 2018-2021), where racist hatred manifests itself in the creation of monsters. I will argue that the series plays into comic book tropes of monstrous superhuman creatures and adapts elements from African American folklore to interrogate the traumatic legacies of anti-Black violence. In reshaping comic book graphics and discourse, Bitter Root is an important contribution to the creation of Afrodiasporic interventions into US popular culture.