Impermanent Blackness: The Making and Unmaking of Interracial Literary Culture in Modern America

Korey Garibaldi discusses his recently published book “Impermanent Blackness: The Making and Unmaking of Interracial Literary Culture in Modern America” with Kinohi Nishikawa.

Korey Garibaldi, Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame, revisits an almost-forgotten American interracial literary culture that advanced racial pluralism in the decades before the 1960s in his recently published “Impermanent Blackness“. In this volume, Garibaldi examines and reinterprets the intermittent flourishing of cross-racial industrial print production underpinning the genre now commonly celebrated as African American literature. Impermanent Blackness shows how innumerable professional and technological challenges to the publishing industry’s color line, now taken for granted, were once central to the promotion of cosmopolitan habits and mentalities during the first seven decades of the twentieth century.

He will be joined in conversation with Kinohi Nishikawa, Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton University.

This event will be livestreamed to YouTube here.

About the Speakers:

Korey Garibaldi studies the social and intellectual history of the United States and Europe (18th – 20th centuries), with particular interests ranging from the Victorian novelist Henry James to Russia’s national poet, Aleksandr Pushkin. His courses focus on histories of citizenship, imperialism, cultural and economic thought, and the African diaspora.

Kinohi Nishikawa specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century African American literature, book history, and popular culture. At Princeton he teaches undergraduate courses on African American humor and African American literary history and graduate seminars on Black archive studies and Black aesthetic theory.