Special Guest:  Professor Louis Chude-Sokei, PhD

Tuesday, December 7^th 2021

Reading: Louis Chude-Sokei (2021)

Linked here are selections: Prologue, Chapters 8 & 9

“What seemed especially strange, given what I knew from being born on the African continent and having spent years on a majority-black island, was that Blackness had nothing to do with where we came from. We immigrants certainly weren’t black – we were told so regularly by our neighbors and friends who were, apparently, really Black. If whiteness wasn’t really about skin, neither was Blackness …"

(Chude-Sokei, Floating in a Most Peculiar Way, p.94)  

Professor Louis Chude-Sokei’s acclaimed memoir is a powerful coming-of-age story of immigration and navigating Blackness in the United States. The son of a mother from Jamaica who emigrates to London, and a father from war-torn Nigeria, Dr. Chude-Sokei’s immersion in the politics of race and belonging takes place across the landscape of the African diaspora. His boyhood begins in a religious household in Jamaica, and moves to Inglewood, Los Angeles, on the eve of the LA riots, where his secret love of books is a danger, and his yearning to become a Black American becomes deeply complicated. Around his mother’s dining table, gatherings of relatives and friends argue about what it means to be a Black Immigrant, in relation to African Americans, and White Americans. Chude-Sokei uses his own story to speak to and for generations of Black immigrants. He will tell us that since 1990, more Black Americans arrived in the US than during the Slave Trade, raising a challenge to conversations of race and politics, and to navigating not just Blackness, but Blacknesses, in America.

Professor Louis Chude-Sokei, Ph.D.  is a Professor of English and Director of the African American Studies Program at Boston University. Professor Chude-Sokei’s writing and award-winning scholarship on the literatures and cultures of the African diaspora appear widely in national and international venues.  He is Editor in Chief of The Black Scholar, one of the oldest and leading journals of Black Studies in the United States. His memoir “Floating in a Most Peculiar Way” was chosen as “One of the Best Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews.

on December 7^th. Please join us.

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