Alison Glassie (NU Boston) will present on the introduction to her book project, which is a circum-Atlantic study of modern and contemporary sea literature in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. It’s interested in how shapeshifting figures like selkies and African-descended sea deities index gendered and racialized experiences with the ocean.
Orlando Reade (NU London) will talk about the presence of epic in the films of John Akomfrah. Inspired by the comic use of Paradise Lost in The Nine Muses (2010), and the wide-ranging literary reading attested in Akomfrah’s interviews, I will explore the less ambivalent engagement with modern epic literature in his recent films, focusing on Vertigo Sea (2015). Akomfrah engages with the contemporary impulse to “anti-epic,” exemplified by the poet M.NourbeSe Philip, while also embracing an epic mode shorn of its associations with machismo and militarism.