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

[James Tobias]

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 quotidianenactments 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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