- This event is over. However, time travel possible through our Audio & Video! See upcoming events
Beyond the White Gaze and Towards a Black, Revolutionary Queerness
Prince Shakur reflects on his life as a queer, Jamaican American, writer, and anarchist navigating life in Obama and Trump’s America.
Speakers
It can be easy to look at the United States today and see a country that has lost its way from its founding ideas (democracy, life, and liberty), but for black Americans, liberty and wealth has always been built on their backs. The age of Trump may expose America’s evils in a seemingly new way, but this current chapter is only a continuation of centuries of systemic racism, colonization, and exploitation.
By exploring his upbringing on the east side of Cleveland, the respectability politics instilled in young black people, displays of black trauma in media, the resiliency of LGBTQIA joy, the complexity of black travel and the ways that young people in America resist, Shakur will craft a narrative of how and why young, queer black people will continue to push boundaries with their life and work.
In collaboration with:
Sangam House is an international writers’ residency program located in India which brings together writers from across the world to live and work among their peers in a safe, supportive and nurturing space.
Speakers
Prince Shakur
Prince Shakur has written on queer culture, youth activism, prison systems/police, black representation in film, and conscious travel for Teen Vogue, AfroPunk, Daily Dot, Electric Literature, and more. He has organized around like Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock, anti-gentrification, struggles at the US/Mexico border, and is a lead organizer with Black Queer and Intersectional Collective. He co-founded Two Woke Minds, a documentary and travel series, with Eli Hiller and earned the 2017 Rising Star grant from GLAAD. He is also writing his premiere non-fiction book and novel.
His awards and achievements include: Rising Star Digital Innovator Grant Recipient (GLAAD, 2017), Leadership Prize (Juvenile Law Center, 2018), Diversity Fellow (Vision for Ohio and Society for Features Journalism, 2019), and Writer in Residence (Sangam House, 2019).
Manan Kapoor
Manan Kapoor is a writer based in New Delhi. His debut novel, The Lamentations of a Sombre Sky, was shortlisted for the Yuva Sahitya Akademi Puruskar 2017. His writings have appeared in Boston Review, The Stockholm Review of Literature, Scroll.in and TheWire.in among other publications. His biography of Agha Shahid Ali is forthcoming from Penguin Random House.
