The University of Louisville in Kentucky recently hosted a lecture titled “Swamp Tales, Trans Ghosts, and Nonbinary Magical Realism” as part of its Global Humanities Lecture Series.
The event description states: “As a nonbinary space that is neither land nor water but both, the swamp serves as the material grounds—as the ‘terra infirma’—for a series of considerations about transformation and difference.”
The lecture was delivered on Tuesday by C. Riley Snorton, a University of Chicago professor of “Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity and English.” The professor’s research interests include “Black Studies,” “Gender and Sexuality Studies,” and “Critical Race Studies.” The lecture was inspired by Snorton’s recent book, “Mud: Ecologies of Racial Meaning.”
Snorton is also the author of “Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low” and “Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity.”
For the lecture, Snorton used the “insights of Black ecologies and trans studies through a nonbinary analytic to raise questions about the coloniality of climate (change) and being,” and also focused on “how Black and Indigenous queer, trans and nonbinary artists and activists are redefining the terms of their difference.”
The event also centered on “Three swamp narratives — the Wild Man of the Green Swamp, the Honey Island Swamp monster, and the Amazonian plant-spirits” to examine “how swamps confound common sense notions of difference, especially in terms of racial and gender categorization.”
The University of Louisville hosted other LGBTQ-themed events in the fall semester, including a “Trans Day of Remembrance Vigil,” a “Name Change Workshop” for transgender-identifying students, and an LGBTQ+ Summit that featured a presentation from a drag performer.
The university’s LGBT Center, which advertised these events, including Snorton’s lecture, describes itself as “committed to dismantling cisheteropatriarchy and other systems of oppression,” and “striv[ing] to affirm LGBTQ+ students, staff and faculty through an anti-racist lens, rooted in social justice and intersectionality.”
Campus Reform contacted the University of Louisville and C. Riley Snorton for comment. This story will be updated accordingly.
This article was originally published at campusreform.org
