DSS Advancing Narratives Speaker Series–Being Ocean as Praxis: Sylvia Wynter, Depth Humanisms and Dark Sciences–Alexis Pauline Gumbs, PhD

This interactive lecture will draw on Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s research on Sylvia Wynter, her practice of navigating in, around, and beyond the academy, and her forthcoming book Dub: Finding Ceremony.

As an educator, Alexis Pauline Gumbs walks in the legacy of black lady school teachers in post-slavery communities who offered sacred educational space to the intergenerational newly free in exchange for the random necessities of life. She honors the lives and creative works of Black feminist geniuses as sacred texts for all people. She believes that in the time we live in access to the intersectional, holistic brilliance of the black feminist tradition is as crucial as learning how to read.  She brings that approach to her work as the provost of the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind, a transmedia- enabled community school (aka tiny black feminist university) and lending library based in Durham, North Carolina.

A queer black troublemaker, a black feminist love evangelist and a prayer poet priestess, Alexis has a PhD in English, African and African-American Studies, and Women and Gender Studies from Duke University. She was the first scholar to research the Audre Lorde Papers at Spelman College, the June Jordan Papers at Harvard University, and the Lucille Clifton Papers at Emory University during her dissertation research.  For more information on Dr. Gumbs, go to:  http://alexispauline.com/

This lecture is part of The Graduate School’s Diversity and Student Success Carolina Cultivation Advancing Narratives Speaker Series.  Co-sponsored by the English and Comparative Literature Department.