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Transcription: [00:48:33]
{Speaker 1}
Screenwriter, poet, novelist, critic, and storiest. Sherley Anne does something boldly unexpected in Invitations. Most practitioners who attempt to encourage and equip us to re-vision the past, such as Toni Morrison in "Beloved", Gail Jones in "Corregidora", Ishmael Reed in "Flight to Canada", Al Young in "Everything." Um.

[00:49:03]
{Speaker 1}
Make use of elements from the emancipatory narrative tradition- that tradition that we've been trained to call the slave narratives. From the abolitionist tradition. Sherley, adopts a writing form that was characteristic of the 19th Century pro-slavery pseudo-scientific industry, that attempted to answer such mind-boggling questions as: "Why do enslaved Africans run?"

[00:49:36]
[[laughter]]

[00:49:40]
{Speaker 1}
That is to say she appropriates a reactionary method for an emancipatory enterprise, and in making- in doing this, she makes a pact between the character Odessa and the reader against the narrator: a Euro-American pseudo-scientific pro-slavery big dog, and in this pact encourages us to liberate ourselves from delusional thinking from the conventional ideas of historiography.

[00:50:16]
{Speaker 1}
"Meditations on History" is available in a double-anthology by Mary Helen Washington called, "Black Eyed Susans and Midnight Birds", and here with the excerpt is Charles Keeling.

[00:50:28]
[[applause]]

[00:50:37]
{Charles Keeling}
Good evening, it's good to be here again. Give me half a second, yeah? To get set up.

Transcription Notes:
---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-01-20 09:48:09