Erica R. Edwards, 'How Very American’: Black Women Writers and the Long War on Terror

Professor Edwards’ talk is based on her forthcoming book The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Grammars of State Violence, which analyzes how contemporary black expressive culture has refracted the culture of U.S. empire throughout the long war on terror, from 1968 to the present. Mapping the transformations of African American literature against global and local campaigns of counterinsurgency, this book argues that Black feminist poetry, fiction, television, and film have exposed the imperial grammars of blackness while also marking out minor grammars of subsistence, survival, and black radical undoing.

Professor Edwards is the Presidential Term Chair in African-American Literature and Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University and a Radcliffe Institute Fellow at Harvard University 2017-2018. She specializes in African American literature, gender and sexuality, and black political culture.