Tennenhouse-Armstrong Lecture Featuring Julius Fleming, Oct. 29th

Duke English will host the second annual Tennenhouse-Armstrong Lecture on Tuesday, October 29th. This year’s featured guest will be Julius Fleming, Associate Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, who will present “Empire After Civil Rights: Race, Outer Space, and the New Geographies of Colonialism.” The lecture will be held at 3:30 PM in room 314 of the Allen Building.

 

Flyer for Tennenhouse-Armstrong Lecture featuring Julius Fleming

Empire After Civil Rights: Race, Outer Space, and the New Geographies of Colonialism

This talk explores how the Civil Rights and decolonization movements helped to instigate a new era of empire and colonialism. It examines how, at the same time that formerly colonized nations were gaining independence, and black people across the globe were beginning to secure social and political freedoms, outer space became a new frontier of global empire building and colonial exploration. It argues that, in the face of this watershed transformation of modernity’s racial geographies, imperial powers like the United States and France worked to convert outer space into the provenance of a distinct post-war site of imperial and colonial expansion. Further, it considers how this quest to colonize outer space entailed a strategic reanimation of prior colonial geographies and networks of colonial relation. But in the face of this scramble to colonize outer space, black artists and activists—from Zambia to the United States to Martinique—turned to outer space in their art and politics to craft anti-colonial, anti-imperial, and anti-racist critiques of this global endeavor to constitute empire anew. 

Professor Fleming earned a PhD in English and a graduate certificate in African studies from the University of Pennsylvania. He specializes in Afro-diasporic literature and cultures and has interests in performance studies, black political culture, diaspora, and colonialism, especially where they intersect with race, gender, and sexuality. Fleming is the author of Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation, which received the 2024 College Language Association Book Prize and the 2022 Hooks National Book Award.

In addition to the lecture, which is open to the Duke community and the public, each invited Tennenhouse-Armstrong guest lecturer hosts a workshop with select students who are invited to discuss the lecturer’s work and interact in a closed setting with the guest.

This lecture series was established to honor Professor Leonard Tennenhouse, who retired at the end of the 2022 Fall semester. This year’s lecture and future installments will honor Professor Tennenhouse and Professor Nancy Armstrong, who retired during the 2023 academic year. This lecture series is a small token of the department’s appreciation for their years of service to Duke English Department.