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Darius Bost Lecture: "Black Gay Freedom: Aesthetic Experimentation and Abolitionist Imaginings in the Work of Marlon Riggs"

Professor Darius Bost (The University of Utah)
September 16, 2019
8:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Wexner Center for the Arts

Dr. Darius Bost is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies in the School for Cultural and Social Transformation at the University of Utah. His first book, Evidence of Being: The Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence (University of Chicago Press, 2018), is an interdisciplinary study of black gay art and activism in Washington, D.C., and New York City during the early era of the AIDS epidemic in the U.S. Related research has been published or is forthcoming in Journal of American HistoryCriticism, Souls, The Black Scholar, Palimpsest, Journal of West Indian LiteratureOccasion, and several edited collections.

Dr. Bost will be giving a talk at the Wexner on September 16th as a part of their 30th anniversary celebration of the film Tongues Untied. Please RSVP for both events with the Wexner Center for the Arts on their website.

Abstract: Building on my recent book on the 1980s black gay cultural renaissance, this talk will focus on the history of NYC-based organizations Gay Men of African Descent (GMAD) and Other Countries Collective alongside the experimental films of San Francisco-based filmmaker Marlon Riggs. The talk explores Riggs' aesthetic experimentation as an imaginative practice of freedom from the modes of capture that have marked the black male homosexual as a ‘slave’ within the black political imagination.

This event is sponsored by the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Student Life Multicultural Center, and Sexuality Studies.