Divine Memory and the Laurie Carlos Oracle

Divine Memory and the Laurie Carlos Oracle: An Engagement with Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Fri. Oct 27th 12pm-2:30pm (Lind Hall Room 320)

As her first public engagement as Winton Chair and in collaboration with the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department, Alexis will offer a lecture on Divine Memory. The example of divine memory that she will activate in the room will be the Laurie Carlos Oracle, a way of story-sharing and embodied memory that honors Carlos's enduring impact in the Twin Cities.

About Alexis Pauline Gumbs
The author of Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (Duke University Press, 2016) and M. Archive: At the End of the World (Duke University Press, forthcoming), Dr. Gumbs has been hailed as an innovative public intellectual whose work challenges the boundaries of artmaking and scholarship. Describing herself as ais a queer black trouble-maker and a black feminist love evangelist. 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. As the first person to do archival research in the papers of Audre Lorde, June Jordan and Lucille Clifton while achieving her PhD in English, Africana Studies and Women’s Studies at Duke University, 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.

About Laurie Carlos (from BOMB Magazine)
Whether on the great stage of the BAM Opera House as the ebullient grandmother in Urban Bush Women’s Praise House, or playing at a packed-to-the-rafters Nuyorican Café with the performance trio Thought Music (consisting of Carlos, Jessica Hagedorn, and Robbie McCauley), or performing a duet with McCauley, Persimmon Peel, at The Working Theatre, or in her own ensemble piece, White Chocolate for My Father, at Performance Space 122, she never gave less than one hundred percent. While with us, every ounce of her body and spirit was full of integrity, commitment, intelligence and passion. She was the recipient of an Obie Award for creating the role of Lady Blue in Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, and a Bessie Award for her extensive and exceptional work in Heat.