Charis welcomes Eddie Glaude Jr. in conversation with Susana Morris for a celebration of Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own. Begin Again is one of the great books on James Baldwin and a powerful reckoning with America’s ongoing failure to confront the lies it tells itself about race. This event is co-hosted by the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History.

Just as in Baldwin’s “after times,” argues Eddie S. Glaude Jr., when white Americans met the civil rights movement’s call for truth and justice with blind rage and the murders of movement leaders, so in our moment were the Obama presidency and the birth of Black Lives Matter answered with the ascendance of Trump and the violent resurgence of white nationalism.

In these brilliant and stirring pages, Glaude finds hope and guidance in Baldwin as he mixes biography—drawn partially from newly uncovered Baldwin interviews—with history, memoir, and poignant analysis of our current moment to reveal the painful cycle of Black resistance and white retrenchment. As Glaude bears witness to the difficult truth of racism’s continued grip on the national soul, Begin Again is a searing exploration of the tangled web of race, trauma, and memory, and a powerful interrogation of what we must ask of ourselves in order to call forth a new America.

Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor and chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. He is the former president of the American Academy of Religion, the largest professional organization of scholars of religion in the world. Glaude is the author of a number of books, including Democracy in Black. He hails from Moss Point, Mississippi, a small town on gulf coast, and is a graduate of Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.

Susana Morris is an associate professor of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is co-founder and contributing writer for the popular feminist blog, The Crunk Feminist Collective. Her first book is Close Kin and Distant Relatives: The Paradox of Respectability in Black Women’s Literature. Her most recent books are the anthology The Crunk Feminist Collection, which was co-edited with Brittney Cooper and Robin Boylorn and , a short story collection of horror written by Black women co-edited with Kinitra D. Brooks and Linda Addison. Morris is also series editor, along with Kinitra D. Brooks, of the book series New Suns: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Speculative. She is currently at work on her latest academic book project, which explores depictions of Black women vampires, Afrofuturism, and feminism.

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Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own--Eddie Glaude Jr. in conversation with Susana Morris