“The Bookshop of Black Queer Diaspora: Aurality against Fascism”

The Humanities Council’s Fall 2026 Gauss Seminars in Criticism will be presented by Roderick Ferguson, William Robertson Coe Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Professor of American Studies at Yale University. His visit will comprise of two public lectures, under the general title “On Destruction and Survival.”

Lecture 1: “The Bookshop of Black Queer Diaspora: On Terror and the Difficult Miracle of Critical Intellection”
Wednesday, October 7
5:00 – 7:00 pm
Betts Auditorium 

Lecture 2: “The Bookshop of Black Queer Diaspora: Aurality against Fascism”
Thursday, October 8
5:00 – 7:00 pm
Betts Auditorium 

An experimental and conceptual text, The Bookshop of Black Queer Diaspora is comprised of a series of fictional visits to a make-a-believe black queer bookshop and art gallery. The bookshop, however, is made up of actual artifacts that invoke the real histories of black queer art and activism, their responses to the ongoing legacies of colonialism and slavery as well as their manifestations in neoliberal and fascist formations.

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About Roderick A. Ferguson

Roderick A. Ferguson is the William Robertson Coe Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and American Studies at Yale University. He is also faculty in the Yale Prison Education Initiative as well as the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute/Yale National Initiative. He is the author of One-Dimensional Queer (Polity, 2019), We Demand: The University and Student Protests (University of California, 2017), The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (University of Minnesota, 2012), and Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (University of Minnesota, 2004). He is the co-editor with Grace Hong of the anthology Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (Duke University, 2011). He is also co-editor with Erica Edwards and Jeffrey Ogbar of Keywords of African American Studies (NYU, 2018). He is the 2020 recipient of the Kessler Award from the Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS). His book In View of the Tradition: Black Art and Radical Thought will be released Fall 2026.