Read New Essays from Earl Brooks and Keegan Cook Finberg

Mon, 23 Sep 2019 11:01:02 -0400

English faculty members Earl Brooks and Keegan Cook Finberg have recently published new essays. Follow the links below to read their work!

Earl Brooks published "Charles Mingus, Rotary Perception, and the 'Fables of Faubus'” on Sounding Out!: The Sound Studies Blog. Brooks writes, "'Fables,' as well as the album on which it appears, Mingus Ah Um, invites questions about the sonics of racism in public and private spheres. Racism oscillates between modes of silence and silencing (unjust systemic processes, othering, isolation), subtle vibrations (micro-aggressions), as well as piercing, cacophonous noise that is as disorienting as it is terrifying. In many ways, this moment made audible (and public) the noise of racism so often confined to the personal encounters of African Americans with white institutions and Jim Crow segregation."

Keegan Cook Finberg published a review of Juliana Spahr’s new book, Du Bois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment, "What Has Literature Ever Done for You?," in the Los Angeles Review of Books. “Can we celebrate the potentiality of literary works — even activate them through scholarship — while also remaining attentive to larger structures and social formations that work to neutralize or redirect that potential?”