AADS New Directions Lecture Series Presents: Dr. Rhonda Frederick

"Revelations in Black ... and Popular: Writing and Learning from Evidence of Things Not Seen"

Evidence of Things Not Seen: Fantastical Blackness in Genre Fictions is an interdisciplinary study of blackness in genre literature of the Americas. It interprets blackness in erotic romance, fantasy, thriller, science fiction, mystery, and police procedural fictions written by African Diaspora writers as a tool that articulates imaginable black being beyond the limits of anti-black racism. It approaches this blackness as a lens through which “unspeakable” black being is re/read and seen as imaginably true: that is, perceptibly real though “not seen,” possible though unprecedented. Ultimately, the imaginable possibilities in these popular genres offer strategies through which the made up can be made real.

Rhonda Frederick is an associate professor of African and African diaspora studies and English at Boston College in Massachusetts. She is the author of "Colón Man a Come": Mythographies of Panama Canal Migration.