With our world-class universities, Chicago is home to some of the leading intellectuals in the US. The CHF has been featuring many of them over the years. And this fall, too, we will present events with such luminaries as Wendy Doniger, Hanna Gray, Laura Kipnis, and Martha Nussbaum. Their presentations will be a wonderful opportunity to see our city’s intellectual prowess at work. Doniger, the leading American scholar of Hinduism, will give a much-anticipated lecture on symbolism in Hindu art; Gray, a noted Renaissance historian and the former president of the University of Chicago will speak on Machiavelli and the body politic; Kipnis will lecture on the American obsession with public scandal, extending her widely praised work on American sexuality; and Nussbaum, the foremost political philosopher in the country, will speak about the concept of disgust.
Picture above: Dwight McBride
In addition to these lectures, we are featuring an event built around another leading Chicago intellectual: Dwight McBride, the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at UIC. McBride is a remarkable scholar and person. A leading expert on African-American literature and culture, he is the author of the widely acclaimed books James Baldwin Now and Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony and the editor of the important anthologies Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual African American Fiction and A Melvin Dixon Critical Reader. In addition, he published a collection of his essays with the best title of any academic book – ever: Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch, the subtitle “Essays on Race and Sexuality” suggesting the central theme of exclusion at the intersection of racism, sexism, and homophobia. In the book, McBride addressed such hot topics as the controversy around Anita Hill, the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and the marginalization of lesbian/gay voices in much of African-American Studies.
The question of race and sexuality will also be at the heart of the CHF event with McBride. And it will reflect his growing stature as one of the leading African-American public intellectuals in the country. For several years now, McBride has been a key voice in debates on sexual equality in the African-American community, addressing such difficult questions as the supposed homophobia in black culture and the complicated analogies between the civil rights movement and the current struggle for lesbian/gay rights. In these debates, McBride has taken a courageous stance, critical of mainstream positions in both the African-American and lesbian/gay communities.
McBride has been particularly vocal on these issues. But he has not developed the position on his own. It came out of long-standing discussions with other young, African-American intellectuals in Chicago. At the CHF, McBride will reassemble this group, which also features University of Chicago political scientist Cathy Cohen, DePaul University philosophy professor Darrell Moore, and Beth Richie, a professor of criminal justice at UIC and the Director of its Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy.
Together, this remarkable group will take stock of the current moment, assessing where things stand on the question of race and sexuality in Barack Obama’s America. Chicago has long been a center for progressive African-American thought. Dwight McBride and his colleagues are continuing this tradition. And we are delighted to take part in the conversation.
Lecture
#707: Sun, Nov. 14 1:00 - 2:30 PM
Tags: religion, art, race, sexuality
