Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
Hybridity haunts the dreams of racial purity, then but not solely as its structural foil. Certainly the existence of racial “hybrids” infuriated racists, as demonstrated by the efforts of nineteenth-century scientists to prove that mulattos were infertile and would naturally die out. But hybridity also interrupts the ability of race to narrativize time. I find a suggestive emblem of such disjunctive or hybrid temporality in “the miscegenation of time,” a phrase from which the state of racialist thinking can never be fully removed. The hybridization of genre implied in the miscegenation of time entails not simply the splicing together of different forms but the encounter of genre with its law and therein its indeterminancy. Exposing fictions of race and progress, hybridity unsettles collective and corporeal memory…
Pulitzer Prize winner and current Mississippi and United States Poet LaureateNatasha Trethewey will read her poetry at Jackson State University at 3 p.m. Sept. 20 in room 166/266 of the Dollye M.E. Robinson College of Liberal Arts Building.
This event will be hosted by the Margaret Walker Center at JSU and is free and open to the public.
In January, Trethewey was named the Mississippi Poet Laureate for a four-year term. Soon after, she was named the 19th U.S. Poet Laureate by the Library of Congress. Trethewey is the first person to serve simultaneously as a state and U.S. laureate.