Japan Speaker Series: Dr. William Bridges

This talk is an attempt to bring together two seemingly disparate research projects. The first is a study of the black Pacific, which considers the ebb and flow of black people, thought, and culture throughout the Pacific. The second is the proposal of a new field of literary studies in the face of crises humanistic, economic, democratic and planetary–New Futurism. New Futurism explores how the reading of literature informs the creation of possible futures and how the reading of futurity informs the possibilities of literary studies. This talk considers the choreography of Watanabe Shin'ichiro's Samurai Champloo and Childish Gambino's "This Is America" as trans-black-Pacific examples of how we might move together through time and space.

Sponsored by the Japanese Program of the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures and the Center for East Asian Studies University of Maryland, College Park