webinar register page

Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America -- A Virtual Discussion with Tara Bynum

Join us for a virtual discussion with author Tara Bynum to celebrate the release of Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America.

In the early United States, a Black person committed an act of resistance simply by reading and writing. Yet we overlook that these activities also brought pleasure.

In Reading Pleasures, Tara A. Bynum tells the compelling stories of four early American writers who expressed feeling good despite living while enslaved or only nominally free. The poet Phillis Wheatley delights in writing letters to a friend. Ministers John Marrant and James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw memorialize their love for God. David Walker’s pamphlets ask Black Americans to claim their victory over slavery. Together, their writings reflect the joyous, if messy, humanity inside each of them. This proof of a thriving interior self in pursuit of good feeling forces us to reckon with the fact that Black lives do matter.

A daring assertion of Black people’s humanity, Reading Pleasures reveals how four Black writers experienced positive feelings and analyzes the ways these emotions served creative, political, and racialized ends.

Mar 8, 2023 01:00 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada)