I REVIEWED THIS for a more legit blog a while ago, but I have a few further notes.
1. The Bagley Wright Lecture series seems to get some real heavy hitters. Ange Mlinko. Fred Moten. Srikanth Reddy. Timothy Donnelly. Rachel Zucker. Tyehimba Jess. Don Mee Choi. Do you have to be a Wave Books author to get an invitation? Maybe. But Wave Books has a great list.
2. The editors of the blog for which I reviewed the book did not want me to go into the topic of minstrelsy, and I see their point, but it's at least interesting that the topic comes up not only here but in the work of Tyehimba Jess and Amaud Jamaul Johnson. A lot of Kearney's book is about the aesthetics and protocols of the contemporary American poetry reading--a richly idiosyncratic species of performance. Since Kearney is Black, and since a great many poetry readings in the U.S. have close-to-all-white audiences, the topic of performing Blackness, of Blackness as spectacle, hence minstrelsy, is bound to come up, and Kearney has some chillingly insightful things to say about it. My editors were right that I am not well-positioned to address Kearney's analysis of the the topic, but I hope someone who is well-positioned does so.
3. I think it would be a great thing for Wave to publish everybody who participates in the series. A few have been published, but I would certainly like to get a look at the Mlinko, Reddy, and Donnelly lectures, and I would rather have the books than video clips.
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