Events

After 45 years of distinguished service, Professor Richard Yarborough is embarking on a well-deserved retirement. We are pleased to invite you to a special symposium in honor of Professor Yarborough to celebrate his extraordinary contributions to the field of African American literature and U.S. literature. This symposium will bring together colleagues, former students, and friends to reflect on his legacy and explore the enduring impact of his research and teaching.

Following the symposium, we invite you to join us for a reception to celebrate Professor Yarborough’s contributions to UCLA and the academic community.

Let us know if you plan to attend by filling out the RSVP form here.
We request that you submit your RSVP to attend.

Date: Friday, December 6
Symposium: 8:45am – 4:00pm
Reception: 4:30pm – 6:00pm
Symposium & Reception Location: Royce Hall, Room 314, 10745 Dickson Ct, Los Angeles, CA 90095
Questions about the event? Contact Marta Wallien: mwallien@english.ucla.edu

This event is organized by Yogita Goyal, Professor of English and African American Studies at UCLA. This event is co-sponsored by UCLA Departments of English and African American Studies, The Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies, UCLA Division of Humanities, and UCLA Division of Social Sciences.

Symposium Schedule

8:45am – 9:15am: Welcome and Introductions

Morning session: 9:30am – 11:30am

9:30am – 10:00am: Daphne Brooks,
“Said the Joker to the Thief…”: Black Rock Nerd Praxis in the Post Soul Era

10:00am – 10:30am: P. Gabrielle Foreman,
Editions for Impact: Baton Passing, Pipeline and Field Building the Yarborough Way

10:30am – 11:00am: Sandra Gunning,
Memory and Trauma in Charlotte Forten’s Civil War Diary, 1862-1863

11:45am – 1:30pm: Lunch break

Afternoon session: 1:30pm – 4:00pm

1:30pm – 2:00pm: Dennis Tyler,
How Oprah Gail Winfrey Makes Love for Books

2:00pm – 2:30pm: Kimberly Mack,
Black Writers Write Rock: A Movement Towards A Reimagined Canon of Rock Criticism and Journalism

2:45pm – 3:15pm: Ryan Kernan,
“Hang Yourself, Poet”: Langston Hughes, Translation, and the Noose of Radical Politics

3:15pm – 3:45pm: Denise Cruz,
Asian America’s Regional Archive

4:30pm – 6:00pm: Reception

Speaker Bios, Presentation Titles & Descriptions

Daphne A. Brooks received her Ph.D. in English from UCLA. Richard Yarborough served on her dissertation committee. Brooks is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Music at Yale University. Full bio can be found here.

Presentation Title:
“Said the Joker to the Thief…”: Black Rock Nerd Praxis in the Post Soul Era

Description:
This talk traces meaningful connections between the aesthetics and performance practices of a range of legendary African American musicians and the academic career of Professor Richard Yarborough. As it will show, the praxis of Black rock nerd culture is equally born out in the music of these artists and the pedagogy and scholarship of one of Black Studies and UCLA’s singular mvps.

Denise Cruz received her Ph.D. in English from UCLA. Richard Yarborough served as co-chair on her dissertation committee. Cruz (she/hers) is Professor and Chair of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She writes and teaches about gender and sexuality in national and transnational cultures.

Presentation Title:
Asian America’s Regional Archives

Description:
This talk is inspired by Richard Yarborough’s groundbreaking editorial and archival research. Yarborough’s editorial work on literary series such as The Heath Anthology of American Literature and The Library of Black Literature, dramatically reshaped our understanding of African American and American literary history. In this presentation, Cruz will draw connections between Yarborough’s archival and editorial work and a regional archive of early twentieth-century Asian American literature.

Gabrielle Foreman received her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from UCB. Richard Yarborough served on her dissertation committee. Foreman is the Paterno Family Chair of American Literature and Professor of African American Studies and History at PSU. She co-founded and co-directs the Center for Black Digital Research/#DigBlk and is the founding director of the Colored Conventions Project. Full bio can be found here.

Presentation Title:
Editions for Impact: Baton Passing, Pipeline and Field Building the Yarborough Way

Description:
This talk will highlight systems for pipeline and field building used by the The Center for Black Digital Research/#DigBlk. Inspired by Richard Yarborough’s dedication to mentoring and pipeline building and also to his investments in field building through the under-valued work of editing, this talk will focus on how The Center merges these two areas through a yearly academic symposium. The Center’s yearly symposium builds on the foundation and legacy of the work of Richard Yarborough.

Sandra Gunning received her B.A. in English from UCLA and her Ph.D. in English from UCB. Richard Yarborough served on her dissertation committee. Gunning is Professor of American Studies and Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Full bio can be found here.

Presentation Title:
“Memory and Trauma in Charlotte Forten’s Civil War Diary, 1862-1863”

Description:
In discussing abolitionist and educator Charlotte Forten, scholars continue to interpret the entire 1854-1892 span of her diaries as evidence of her “representative” nineteenth-century Black womanhood, proving her to have been high minded; modest; artistically talented; and committed to racial uplift. However, this approach ignores the ways Forten’s Civil War-era entries reverberate with the horror of tending to wounded soldiers in South Carolina, and the ever present danger of sexual assault facing all Black women at the hands of both white Union troops and Confederate guerillas. Gunning will explore the omissions, confrontations, containments, and deflections in Forten’s wartime writing.

Ryan James Kernan received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA.  Richard Yarborough served as co-chair on his dissertation committee. Kernan is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, where he specializes in the study of African American and African Diasporic cultural production, Literature of the Americas and translation studies.

Presentation Title:
“Hang Yourself, Poet”: Langston Hughes, Translation, and the Noose of Radical Politics

Description:
This paper offers a meditation on Black writing and radical politics by way of an examination of both Langston Hughes’s work in translation and Langston Hughes’s work as a translator.  In Hughes’s case, the common consensus has been that his commitment to radical politics and poetics was a miscalculation that not only led him to produce poor poetry but also to his political persecution.  In this paradigm, Hughes’s engagement with radical politics is seen as the cause of his poetic and personal downfall, and his alleged abandonment of his so-called radical phase is figured as his poetic resurrection.  Kernan’s talk will challenge this narrative.

Kimberly Mack received her Ph.D. in English from UCLA. Richard Yarborough served as chair on her dissertation committee. She is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her book, Living Colour’s Time’s Up, part of Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 book series, was published in May 2023. Full bio can be found here.

Presentation Title:
Black Writers Write Rock: A Movement Towards A Reimagined Canon of Rock Criticism and Journalism

Description:
In this talk, Mack will focus on Vernon Gibbs, a Black writer who wrote about rock during the 1970s and into the 1980s for many publications, including Detroit’s legendary Creem magazine. Using Gibbs’ 1983 Creem feature about Prince, and his first-person accounts from their 2021 interview, Mack considers the ways in which Gibbs’ bold and confrontational writing style disrupts the race and gender expectations prevalent in the 1970s and early 1980s (and beyond) for what a rock star—and a rock critic for that matter—should look like.

Dennis Tyler received his Ph.D. in English from UCLA. Richard Yarborough served as chair on his dissertation committee. Tyler is an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in African American literature and culture, disability studies, critical race studies, popular culture, and performance studies. He is the author of Disabilities of the Color Line: Redressing Antiblackness from Slavery to the Present (NYU Press, 2022). Full bio can be found here.

Presentation Title:
“How Oprah Gail Winfrey Makes Love for Books”

Description:
Using Richard Yarborough’s impressive canon-building work as a starting point, this talk will shift to examine how Winfrey, in creating and developing Oprah’s Book Club, forms a distinct canon of her own. To create a diverse and inclusive community of readers, Winfrey engages in an ethic of love, a practice of cultivating care for and appreciation of books, authors, and readers by foregrounding notions of community, attachment, and pleasure. Winfrey’s literary affections—in particular, how she describes books as companions, cultivates intimate attachments to authors, and regards reading as a form of self-care––reveals how a book can be both savior and sanctuary, a means of self-affirmation and protection in an otherwise hostile and perilous world.