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The Breaks: Julietta Singh in conversation with Emily Bernard

Event date: 
Sunday, September 12, 2021 - 6:30pm to 8:00pm

This event takes place on crowdcast, Charis' virtual event platform. Register here. 

Charis welcomes Julietta Singh in conversation with Emily Bernard for a celebration of The Breaks: An Essay. A profound meditation on race, inheritance, and queer mothering at the end of the world.

In a letter to her six-year-old daughter, Julietta Singh writes toward a tender vision of the world, offering children's radical embrace of possibility as a model for how we might live. In order to survive looming political and ecological disasters, Singh urges, we must break from the conventions we have inherited and begin to orient ourselves toward more equitable and revolutionary paths.

The Breaks celebrates queer family-making, communal living, and Brown girlhood, complicating the stark binaries that shape contemporary U.S. discourse. With nuance and generosity, Singh reveals the connections among the crises humanity faces--climate catastrophe, extractive capitalism, and the violent legacies of racism, patriarchy, and colonialism--inviting us to move through the breaks toward a tenable future.

Julietta Singh is a writer and academic whose work engages the enduring effects of colonization, current ecological crisis, and queer-feminist futures. She is the author of two previous books: No Archive Will Restore You (Punctum Books, 2018) and Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements (Duke University Press, 2018). She currently lives in Richmond, Virginia, with her family.

Emily Bernard is the author of Black is the Body: Stories from My Mother's Time and Mine, which was named one of the best books of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews and National Public Radio. Black is the Body won the 2020 Los Angeles Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for autobiographical prose. Emily’s previous books include: Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; and Some of My Best Friends: Writings on Interracial Friendship, which was chosen by the New York Public Library as a Book for the Teen Age; and, with Deborah Willis, Michelle Obama: The First Lady in Photographs, which received a 2010 NAACP Image Award. Her work has appeared in: Harper’s, TLS, The New Republic, The New Yorker, O the Oprah Magazine, Image, Best American Essays, Best African American Essays, and Best of Creative Nonfiction. She has received fellowships from the Alphonse A. Fletcher Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Arts Council, and the W. E. B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University. Emily was the inaugural James Weldon Johnson Senior Research Fellow in African American Studies at Yale University. A 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, Emily lives in South Burlington, Vermont, with her husband and twin daughters.

This event is free and open to all people, especially to those who have no income or low income right now, but we encourage and appreciate a solidarity donation in support of the work of Charis Circle, our programming non-profit. Charis Circle's mission is to foster sustainable feminist communities, work for social justice, and encourage the expression of diverse and marginalized voices. https://donatenow.networkforgood.org/CharisCircle?code=chariscirclepage

We will be archiving this event and adding closed captioning as soon as possible after airing so that it will be accessible to deaf and HOH people. If you have other accessibility needs or if you are someone who has skills in making digital events more accessible please don't hesitate to reach out to info@chariscircle.org. We are actively learning the best practices for this technology and we welcome your feedback as we begin this new way of connecting across distances.

By attending our virtual event you agree to our Code of Conduct: Our event seeks to provide a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religion (or lack thereof), class, or technology choices. We do not tolerate harassment in any form. Sexual language and imagery are not appropriate. Anyone violating these rules will be expelled from this event and all future events at the discretion of the organizers. Please report all harassment to info@chariscircle.org immediately.

Event address: 
CROWDCAST
The Breaks By Julietta Singh Cover Image
$16.95
ISBN: 9781566896160
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: Coffee House Press - September 7th, 2021

A profound meditation on race, inheritance, and queer mothering at the end of the world.


No Archive Will Restore You By Julietta Singh Cover Image
$19.00
ISBN: 9781947447851
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: Punctum Books - October 4th, 2018

At once memoir, theory, poetic prose, and fragment, NO ARCHIVE WILL RESTORE YOU is a feverish meditation on the body. Departing from Antonio Gramsci's summons to compile an inventory of the historical traces left in each of us, Singh engages with both the impossibility and urgent necessity of crafting an archive of the body.


Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements By Julietta Singh Cover Image
$28.69
ISBN: 9780822369394
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: Duke University Press - January 2nd, 2018

Julietta Singh challenges the drive toward the mastery over self and others by showing how the forms of self-mastery advocated by anticolonial thinkers like Fanon and Gandhi unintentionally reproduced colonial logic, thereby leading her to argue for a more productive human subjectivity that is not centered on concepts of mastery.


Event Summary: 
Charis welcomes Julietta Singh in conversation with Emily Bernard for a celebration of The Breaks: An Essay. A profound meditation on race, inheritance, and queer mothering at the end of the world.