Hybrid Event: ‘Race, Mediation, and the Problem of Extractive Reading’: A Teagarden Lecture at the University of Exeter with Christine Okoth

Please join us at 4.30pm Monday 3rd June 2024 in LT2 (Queens Building) for the Department of English and Creative Writing’s Annual Teagarden Lecture.

We are delighted to welcome Dr Christine Okoth (Lecturer in Literatures and Cultures of the Black Atlantic, King’s College London) who will speak on ‘Race, Mediation, and the Problem of Extractive Reading’.

The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception in the Queens Cafe. All are welcome to attend.

Race, Mediation, and the Problem of Extractive Reading

This talk delineates a critique of extractive reading, which I propose characterises scholarly engagement with Black literature and visual art.  Extractive reading allows for the tidy removal of resources from a piece of writing or art in pursuit of a neat theoretical intervention and folds the aesthetic object into existing scholarly frameworks. I see extractive reading as an environmentally inflected counterpart to what Anthony Reed calls racialized reading. While ‘racialized reading’ in Reed’s definition refers to a practice of ‘misreading [which] locates texts within a pre-emptive black tradition or black social location’ is most frequently observed in the critical treatment of experimental US writers, I invoke it here to refer to the treatment of environmentally conscious Black literature and art. Extractive reading invites interpretive practices that are preoccupied with the raw material itself and, in accepting its primacy as an organizational principle, repeat those very gestures of excavation that animated colonial expansion.

Please register attendance using the eventbrite link below. If you’d like to attend remotely, please contact EnglishCreativeWriting@exeter.ac.uk