[Poscgrad] Donald Zarate award and talk

[Kevin Esterling]

Dear colleagues,

Below is an announcement from the English Department. A big congrats to
Donald! See below....




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.
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