Jan. 29 & 30. RC students direct and perform this popular semiannual 90-minute program of short scenes on a variety of topics and in a variety of styles, many written by RC students.
Jan. 29 & 30. RC students direct and perform this popular semiannual 90-minute program of short scenes on a variety of topics and in a variety of styles, many written by RC students.
RC Writers Tea, open to majors and current writing students who are non majors, and current students interested in the writing major. In RC’s Benzinger Library.
Stephen Berrey reads from his new book The Jim Crow Routine, followed by a discussion with Angela Dillard and audience Q&A.
The South’s system of Jim Crow racial oppression is usually understood in terms of legal segregation that mandated the separation of white and black Americans. Yet, as Stephen A. Berrey shows, it was also a high-stakes drama that played out in the routines of everyday life, where blacks and whites regularly interacted on sidewalks and buses and in businesses and homes. Every day, individuals made, unmade, and remade Jim Crow in how they played their racial roles—how they moved, talked, even gestured. The highly visible but often subtle nature of these interactions constituted the Jim Crow routine.
In this study of Mississippi race relations in the final decades of the Jim Crow era, Berrey argues that daily interactions between blacks and whites are central to understanding segregation and the racial system that followed it. Berrey shows how civil rights activism, African Americans’ refusal to follow the Jim Crow script, and national perceptions of southern race relations led Mississippi segregationists to change tactics. No longer able to rely on the earlier routines, whites turned instead to less visible but equally insidious practices of violence, surveillance, and policing, rooted in a racially coded language of law and order. Reflecting broader national transformations, these practices laid the groundwork for a new era marked by black criminalization, mass incarceration, and a growing police presence in everyday life.
About the Author
Stephen A. Berrey is assistant professor of American culture and history at the University of Michigan. His research explores the relationship between racial practices and everyday culture in the twentieth-century U.S.
Angela D. Dillard is the Earl Lewis Collegiate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and in the Residential College. She specializes in American and African-American intellectual history, particularly around issues of race, religion and politics—on both the Left and the Right sides of the political spectrum.
The Author’s Forum is a collaboration between the U-M Institute for the Humanities, University Library, & Ann Arbor Book Festival.
Additional support for this event provided by the departments of Afroamerican and African History, American Culture, History, and the Residential College.
RC Creative Writing alumna Carrie Smith will read from Silent City, her new crime novel. Carrie won three Hopwood Awards (one in 1977 and two in 1979), and a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She has been a finalist in Nimrod Magazine’s Katherine Anne Porter prize for fiction, and is the author of a literary first novel, Forget Harry published by Simon & Schuster. Carrie moved to New York City in 1981. By day, she is Senior Vice President and Publisher of Benchmark Education Company. By night, she thinks about murder. She lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with her partner and sixteen year old twins.
U-M drama students in Kate Mendeloff’s play production seminar direct and perform renowned English playwright Caryl Churchill’s acclaimed 2012 play about relationships in the digital age presented as an evolving mosaic
Created by Midwestern Gothic in partnership with the Residential College, Voices of the Middle West is a festival celebrating writers from all walks of life as well as independent presses and journals that consider the Midwestern United States their home. The Festival will take place on March 12th, starting at 10am, at East Quad. The festival includes panels and a book fair, and is free to the public. Ross Gay is the keynote speaker.
The goal of the festival is to bring together students and faculty of the university, as well as writers and presses from all over the Midwest, in order to provide a perspective of this region and to showcase the magnificent work being produced here, the stories that need to be told…the voices that need to be heard. Truly, this is a celebration of the Midwest voice, and it is the festival’s aim to create an ideal environment for any and all to come and take an active part, to discover and discuss how rich our literary tradition is.
More information at http://midwestgothic.com/voices/
RC drama instructors Martin Walsh and Kate Mendeloff’s students direct and perform 8 short plays by Ives, an acclaimed contemporary American playwright best known for his one-act comedies.
Mar. 25 & 26. RC students present Jessica Swale’s 2013 drama, set at Girton College, Cambridge in 1896, about the struggle of Cambridge’s first women students to be allowed to graduate.
Mar. 25 & 26. RC students present Jessica Swale’s 2013 drama, set at Girton College, Cambridge in 1896, about the struggle of Cambridge’s first women students to be allowed to graduate.
