“DU BOIS’S TELEGRAM is a brilliant inquiry into the institutions—from the CIA to the foundations and literary magazines it funded—that inform and shape literary production. The promoted, the funded and heralded—from Richard Wright to Gertrude Stein to James Baldwin—do the work of the nation state under the umbrella of culture. Our complicit freedoms are brought out in the open in this thought-provoking and erudite book. This is not a book to agree or disagree with, but rather a compelling argument that brings relevant facts forward for clear-eyed consideration. One would be remiss to pass on such essential research and analysis.” — Claudia Rankine

Juliana Spahr—author of DU BOIS’S TELEGRAM —will be joined by Rankine for a discussion about the book, which takes as its impetus the telegram W.E.B. Du Bois sent when he was denied a passport to attend the 1956 Présence Africaine Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris:

“Any Negro-American who travels abroad today must either not discuss race conditions in the United States or say the sort of thing which our State Department wishes the world to believe.” — W.E.B. Du Bois

 

CLAUDINE RANKINE AND JULIANA SPAHR

Thursday, December 13, at 7:30 pm.

92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Avenue, New York City.

 

DUBOIS’S TELEGRAM—LITERARY RESISTANCE AND STATE CONTAINMENT, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).

Above: Claudia Rankine.

Below: Juliana Spahr.