No Weapon Formed Against Me: The Black Intermezzi of a Vigilante State

With the protection and celebration of Black living at its center, "No Weapon" discusses the suspended state(s) of Black survival, antiBlack violence, and the music that informs and exceeds each.

The Department of American Studies will host a reception following the lecture. 

About the Presenters

An interdisciplinary humanist and multigenre writer, Dr. Shana L. Redmond (Columbia University) thinks and creates at the intersection of music, identity, and power. She has written extensively about the Black anthems that serve as both a repository for collective memory and mobilizing agent for social and political change, as well as about the iconic people who compose those soundtracks. She is currently at work on a project titled Dark Prelude: Black Life Before Mourning, a speculative account of Black listening before state violence.
 

Moderator

Elliott H. Powell is Beverly and Richard Fink Professor in Liberal Arts, Associate Professor of American Studies and Asian American Studies, and affiliate faculty in the Department of African-American and African Studies and the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Sounds from the Other Side: Afro-South Asian Collaborations in Black Popular Music (University of Minnesota Press), and at work on two projects, tentatively titled Prince, Porn, and Public Sex, which explores the politics of sex(uality) and music in Minneapolis during the 1980s, and Illegitimate Sounds, which explores the queer potentiality of recordings like demos that do not conform to commercial audio legibility.