[Chass-gradstudents] Fwd: Lindon Barrett Award in Black Studies Talk 2025: Donald Zarate 3 - 4:30 PM Thursday December 4 HMNSS 1500

[Perla Fabelo]

Dear Graduate Programs,
I am forwarding the following talk announcement.
Best,
Perla


---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: James Tobias <jtobias at ucr.edu>
Date: Tue, Dec 2, 2025 at 12:09 PM
Subject: Lindon Barrett Award in Black Studies Talk 2025: Donald Zarate 3 -
4:30 PM Thursday December 4 HMNSS 1500
To: Englishfaculty at lists.ucr.edu <Englishfaculty at lists.ucr.edu>, GSEA
English <englishgrad at lists.ucr.edu>, <english-undergrad at lists.ucr.edu>,
Monica Cardenas <monica.cardenas at ucr.edu>, Christy Gray <
christy.gray at ucr.edu>, Gene Gray <gene.gray at ucr.edu>, Ruben Fierro <
ruben.fierro at ucr.edu>, Leann Gilmer <leann.gilmer at ucr.edu>, Perla Fabelo <
perla.fabelo at ucr.edu>
Cc: Donald Zarate <donald.zarate at ucr.edu>


Dear faculty, administrative staff, graduate students, and undergraduates:

Each year the English Department hosts a talk by the winner of the Lindon
Barrett Award in Black Studies.

This year’s award winner, Donald Zarate (Political Science), will be
presenting the 2024-2025 Lindon Barrett Award talk at 3 - 4:30 PM Thursday
December 4 in HMNSS 1500.

Donald will be presenting on his essay “Here and Now”:

"This talk draws on my essay "Here and Now" to reconsider what “utopia”
means when grounded in the everyday practices of Black life. Instead of
imagining utopia as a far-off ideal – or dismissing it as an impossible
dream – I argue that Black intellectual and creative traditions show how it
emerges in the ordinary work of making life livable under constraint – of
living *otherwise*. Bringing utopian studies in conversation with thinkers
such as Paget Henry, Janya Brown, and Katherine McKittrick, I develop the
idea of a “Black Differential”: the uneven distribution of antiutopian
disenchantment across racialized experience. Attending to this differential
shows how Black life makes visible the intimate interplay of structure,
agency, and imagination—where survival itself becomes a speculative act. By
foregrounding these *quotidian*enactments of living *otherwise*, I invite
scholars to see utopia as something enacted  *otherwise*   and *now* rather
than relegated to an *elsewhere *or *elsewhen*, reframing both the limits
and the possibilities of imagining otherwise."

English will be providing light refreshments.

Please join us - this talk will be our closing event for 2025, so I’m
looking forward to seeing you all there.

James Tobias, Ph.D.
Professor
Chair, Department of English

https://ucr.zoom.us/j/95465985946?pwd=Z1A4Yk1UZDhBTjY5UkJ5R1VQTWUvQT09

"We at UCR would like to respectfully acknowledge and recognize
our responsibility to the original and current caretakers of this land,
water, and air: the Cahuilla, Tongva, Luiseño, and Serrano peoples and all
of their ancestors and descendants, past, present, and future. Today
this meeting place is home to many Indigenous peoples from all over
the world, including UCR faculty, students, and staff, and we are grateful
to have the opportunity to live and work on these homelands."
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