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.

Counter to such extractive readings, I propose that the work of Black writers and artists who are concerned with questions of environment should be understood as an invitation to develop ways of reading that can account for the shifting composition of race and its often tenuous but nevertheless central connection to raw materials extraction. In the second half of this talk, I show how the appearance of the raw material and its circumstances of extraction are an occasion for an interpretive process that we as critics must undertake so that we can uncover the connections between raw materials extraction and the category of difference we call race.

Christine Okoth is Lecturer in Literatures and Cultures of the Black Atlantic in the Department of English at King’s College London. Her work is primarily concerned with questions of environment and race in contemporary Black literature and visual art. Prior to coming to King’s, Christine was Research Fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick where she worked on Mike Niblett and Chris Campbell’s Leverhulme-funded project ‘World Literature and Commodity Frontiers.‘ She is currently writing a book entitled Race and the Raw Material and her work has been published in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Modern Fiction Studies, Cambridge Quarterly, and Textual Practice.

Christine Okoth - King's College London (kcl.ac.uk)

If you'd like to attend remotely, please contact [email protected]

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Queens LT2 University of Exeter Queen's Building, The Queen's Drive, Exeter, United Kingdom