Award-winning Author to Speak at Humanities Collective Lecture

As the United States undergoes a reckoning with centuries of racial injustice, the first Black and South Asian American woman to be selected as a major political party’s vice presidential candidate is facing racism and birtherism. And like so many African Americans, including the Ivy-League educated lawyers who became president and first lady of our nation, there are still so many who continue to be diminished regardless of their citizenship and vast accomplishments. 

Given the urgency of these ongoing conversations, Trinity University’s Humanities Collective is proud to present the lecture “Homemade Citizenship: All But Inviting Injury” by Koritha Mitchell, Ph.D., on Thursday, September 17 at 7 p.m., on Trinity’s Tiger Network.

Mitchell examines how African Americans have presented themselves in the context of domesticity, success, and citizenship. “Though their success will not likely bring them the safety and respectability it should, African Americans seem to cling to all that purportedly makes one an ideal citizen, including the heteronormative nuclear family and its traditional household,” she explains.

“What does this pattern of investing against the odds reveal about African American culture? The short answer: ‘homemade citizenship,’” says Mitchell. 

Mitchell is a literary historian, cultural critic, and associate professor of English at Ohio State University. Her second book, From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture, was published in August. She is also the author of Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, which won book awards from the American Theatre and Drama Society and from the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. 

The Trinity University Humanities Collective fosters humanistic learning and enables meaningful action through programming that supports the scholarship of humanities faculty and students; engages partners on campus and in the community to advance the public humanities; and calls attention to the relevance of the humanities in contemporary society. Follow Trinity University Humanities Collective on Facebook and learn more on our website.

This lecture is free to the public and will be live streamed through Trinity’s Tiger Network, and registration is encouraged. For more information contact the University’s Humanities Collective at humanities@trinity.edu.