UCSB Professor Jacqueline Bobo, author of Black Women as Cultural Readers, to visit UIUC campus

by:

Scholar Jacqueline Bobo will be giving a lecture entitled "Subversive Spaces and Resistant Black Women" on March 8th at 7pm. This event will take place in the English Building, room 160.


Working collectively as an interpretive community of cultural producers, critics/scholars, and cultural consumers, Black women function as social agents fully capable of erasing repressive historical images. Provocative examples surface in those moments and spaces of subversion that burst forth when Black female audience members spontaneously and collectively participate in art that has not been orchestrated by mainstream culture. Agency, self-determination, recognition of systemic forces of oppression, and transformation of self and culture are goals and possibilities in the confluence of Black women as cultural activists.



Choice described Bobo's Black Women as Cultural Readers as, "a pathbreaking study of African-American women's responses to literature and film. . . Bobo focuses on a small group of middle-class African-American women as they process literature (by Terry McMillan, Alice Walker) that addresses their own experiences. . . This work should command the attention of all scholars of American popular culture."

Also sponsored by Asian American Studies, Center for Advanced Study, Center on Democracy in a Multiracial Society, Cinema Studies, English, Gender & Women Studies, IPRH, Latina/o Studies, Media Studies, Native American Studies, Speech Communication, Unit for Interpretive Criticism, Women & Gender in Global Perspectives