Event Description
Jayna Brown joins Comparing Domains of Improvisation for a presentation and discussion about her upcoming book, Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds, which focuses on the work of improvisers such as Sun Ra and Alice Coltrane.
Jayna Brown’s areas of knowledge and interest include Black expressive cultures, film, queer of color critique, anarchism, materialism, and science fiction. Her first book, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Duke University Press, 2008), won Best Book awards from the American Society for Theatre Research and the Theater Library Association. She has also published on African American race film and popular performance in various journals, including The Journal of Popular Music Studies, GLQ, Social Text, and Women and Performance. Her new book, Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (Duke University Press, forthcoming), traces Black radical utopian practice and performance, from the psychic travels of Sojourner Truth to the cosmic transmissions of Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra.
Event Speaker
Jayna Brown, Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute
Event Information
Free and open to the public; RSVP required via Eventbrite. Registered attendees will receive an event link shortly before the seminar begins. Please contact the group organizer, Jessie Cox, at [email protected] with any questions. This event is sponsored by the Presidential Scholars in Society and Neuroscience program at Columbia University.
