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All are invited to the next Karl W. Weiss ’87 Faculty Lecture Series, sponsored by the Academic Support Committee. Our featured speaker, Sarah Buckner, will be giving a talk titled “To Walk the World as a Wound: Heartbreak, Sentimentality, and Mary Prince” on Wednesday, March 3, at 7 p.m. in the Quigley Auditorium. Below is a brief description of Prof. Buckner’s talk:
Called by James Baldwin “the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion… the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel,” sentimentality has long been understood in Black literary studies as an underhanded tool of white supremacy. Stitching together a haunting childhood story, controversies surrounding ABC’s first Black Bachelor, and Mary Prince’s 1831 narrative The History of Mary Prince, this talk traces the ongoing violence sentimentality poses for Black subjects, marking its presence in literary and media representations as well as everyday life.