Special Upcoming INVISIBLE MAN Post-Show Conversations

From Sam Lasman, Literary Professional Intern

Given the depth and complexity of the themes explored in Invisible Man (both the novel and our currently running stage adaptation), we've invited local scholars who study Ellison, his work, and/or broader themes of African-American literature and identity to lend their voices to a few of our regular post-show conversations. On Saturday, January 12, Robin Bernstein, an Associate Professor of African and African American Studies and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University, joined us following the 2pm performance. She brought keen perspectives on the representation of invisibility and the performance of black narratives to the conversation. Her most recent book, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, won the 2012 Outstanding Book Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.

Upcoming guests include:

• Saturday, January 19, following the 2pm performance: Cynthia Young, Associate Professor of English and African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College, teaches courses on race, film, and African American literature. She is the author of Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left and has written widely on popular culture.
• Sunday, January 20, following the 2pm performance: Theo Theoharis, an Associate in the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, teaches a course on the cultural politics of Invisible Man. Professor Theoharis has published books on authors as disparate as Ibsen, Joyce, and Cavafy.
• Saturday, January 26, following the 2pm performance: Sandy Alexandre, an associate professor of American literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the author of The Properties of Violence  (2012), which explores the connections between various representational forms of lynching and the issue of black dispossession. She is conducting research for her second book, trying to determine if slavery's discourse of black “thinghood” — as chattel, cargo, etc. — informs representations of black people’s relationship to material objects. She also has published several scholarly articles.
• Saturday, February 2, following the 2pm performance: Glenda Carpio is a professor of African and African American Studies and English at Harvard University. Her book, Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery, was published by Oxford University Press in 2008. She is currently working on a book on immigration, expatriation, and exile in American literature. Professor Carpio also recently co-edited African American Literary Studies: New Texts, New Approaches, New Challenges (2011) with Professor Werner Sollors.

We hope you'll join us for one of these special conversations. If you've already seen Invisible Man, let us know what themes you left the theatre thinking about.