Soyica Diggs Colbert

What would it mean to “get over slavery”? Is such a thing possible? Is it even desirable? To explore these questions, The Psychic Hold of Slavery assembles a diverse collection of literary and film critics, philosophers, and cultural theorists. With a painful awareness that our understanding of the past informs our understanding of the present—and vice versa—the contributors place slavery’s historical legacies in conversation with twenty-first-century manifestations of antiblack violence, dehumanization, and social death.   

What would it mean to “get over slavery”? Is such a thing possible? Is it even desirable? To explore these questions, The Psychic Hold of Slavery assembles a diverse collection of literary and film critics, philosophers, and cultural theorists. With a painful awareness that our understanding of the past informs our understanding of the present—and vice versa—the contributors place slavery’s historical legacies in conversation with twenty-first-century manifestations of antiblack violence, dehumanization, and social death.   

Black Movements analyzes how artists and activists of recent decades reference earlier freedom movements in order to imagine and produce a more expansive and inclusive democracy. Through an exploration of the way that black movements create circuits connecting people across space and time, Colbert offers important interventions into performance, literary, diaspora, and American studies.