[Sfts-faculty] Guest speaker on Feb. 29

[andré carrington]

Dear colleagues,

Please join me in welcoming a guest speaker to campus on *Thursday,
February 29*, at *2:30p.m.* in *INTS 1111* (the round room). Refreshments
will be provided.

[image: flyer-1.png]

*Will Pruitt* is a Chancellor's fellow at UCLA in English & the Ralph
Bunche Center for African American Studies, researching representations and
narratives of Black U.S. presidents. He'll be joining some of the grad
students in the Speculative Fiction emphasis for a discussion of his
ongoing research involving a speculative/alternate history novel by Irving
Wallace, *The Man*, which was adapted as a film by Rod Serling (*Twilight
Zone*). See the attached flyer and description below:

*TITLE*: "Represented and Destroyed by *The Man* (1964): The Fate of the
Critical Black Intellectual in Liberal Fantasies of a Counter-Insurgent
Black U.S. Presidency"

*DESCRIPTION*: During an interview transcribed and published in *Irving
Wallace: A Writer's Profile* (1974), the titular author narrates an
anecdote in which he promises James Baldwin that his 1964 novel, *The Man*,
will smuggle Baldwin's antiracist ideas into white households. *The Man* not
only fails to accomplish this goal; it trains its implied readers to assess
Black intellectuals' criticisms of the U.S. with skepticism during a future
Black U.S. Presidency. Preemptively, it represents and destroys the
critical Black intellectual. Published more than a half-century later,
Barack Obama's first presidential memoir, *A Promised Land* (2020),
partially replicates this effect. Comparing intellectual Black figures in
Wallace and Obama's epic narratives, Will Pruitt will demonstrate how the
liberal fantasy of a Black U.S. Presidency has attempted to undermine
critical Black thought for more than half-a-century. This fantasy,
initiated by liberals during the early decades of the Cold War and promoted
by them since then, constantly evolves, "rationalizing violence," to quote
Jodi Melamed, "in the new racial capitalism."

*BRIEF BIOGRAPHY*: Will Pruitt is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the
Department of English and the Ralph J.  Bunche Center for African American
Studies at UCLA. With expertise in the Black Radical Tradition, Black
feminism, Black queer studies, Black performance studies, and U.S.
literature, he’s writing a book manuscript entitled, “Black U.S. Presidents
During the Jim Crow Era: A History of Hypotheticals.” The most recent issue
of the *James Baldwin Review *includes his historiographic essay on
biographies about Baldwin.

-- 
andré m. carrington

Associate Professor of English
University of California, Riverside
Director, Designated Emphasis in Speculative Fictions & Cultures of Science
<https://sfts.ucr.edu/directors-report>
--
Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction
<https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/speculative-blackness>
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