Claudia Rankine & Pamela Sneed
November 8, 2023
6 p.m.
Maude Fife Room (315 Wheeler Hall)
This event was initiated by Simon(e) van Saarloos and sponsored by the Rhetoric Department, Stone Chair Funds, Black Studies Collaboratory, Townsend Center, Arts & Research Center, Department of English, the Holloway Poetry Series, and the Othering & Belonging Institute.
Simon(e) van Saarloos, author of Take ‘Em Down. Scattered Monuments and Queer Forgetting and PhD Rhetoric student at UC Berkeley, invited poets Claudia Rankine & Pamela Sneed for a conversation on commemoration in the fall of 2023.
In Citizen. An American Lyric, poet, playwright and MacArthur fellow Claudia Rankine writes: “This would be your fatal flaw–your memory, vessel of feelings …” The accumulation of everyday violence and racism forms heavy memories that make it difficult to imagine a present and future different from the past.
In Funeral Diva, poet and visual artist Pamela Sneed laments surviving the AIDS crisis in NYC as a Black lesbian. While grieving the friends she lost, Sneed also mourns the erasure of Black lesbians and their labor and asks: “Who takes care of the caretakers?”
How to care for erased stories, while simultaneously creating different ways of storytelling: stories that do not rely on legibility, relatability, certainty and factual proof?
The recording of the conversation is embedded, and can also be watched on ARC's YouTube here.
