Sharon P. Holland delivers a presentation at the Salzburg Global Seminar during the American Studies Alumni Association 2010 Symposium. This meeting was held in honor of Emory Elliott, and was entitled "American Literary History in a New Key".
Here, Professor Holland challenges the traditional definitions of American Studies, and argues that a new understanding of American Studies must be accepted, in order to recognize minority and other contributions. She reflects on her experience teaching American Studies in Spain, under a Fulbright scholarship, as being a transnational and transformational experience... "Instead of doing American Studies, it was doing me".
She also analyzes topics such as, black queer theory, feminism, and desire, in connection with her latest book The Erotic Life of Racism.
Bio
Sharon P. Holland
Sharon P. Holland is an associate professor of English, African and African-American studies, and women's studies at Duke University. She has held faculty appointments at Stanford, SUNY-Albany, UIChicago, and Northwestern.
Professor Holland is the author of Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity (Duke UP, 2000). She is also co-author of a collection of trans-Atlantic Afro-Native criticism with Professor Tiya Miles (American Culture, UM, Ann Arbor) entitled Crossing Waters/ Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country (Duke University Press, 2006).
She was instrumental in the republication of Lila Karp's The Queen is in the Garbage (1969) (Feminist Press, 2007), one of the first, second
wave feminist novels. The second monograph now under submission to Duke University Press is entitled The Erotic Life of Racism. Professor Holland's third book book project is entitled Perishment and deals with discourse at the divide between the human and the animal.
She is a graduate of Princeton University and holds a Ph.D. in English and African American studies from the University of Michigan, Ann
Arbor.
Interesting and incisive review of a sensitive topic. She appeared to have not to have read through her material prior to speech. It was a little difficult to follow her thinking. Still. at the end, I feel I finally got it. I looked up a few things online. Once "I got it", I can say the subtle side-stepping of the issue of race, sexual orientation, and race & sexual orientation will probably continue for some time, since, religion is not going away ( particularly Protestantism).
She correctly has pin-pointed the real issue with the outing of the fear of having Black Studies too closely associated with American Studies. I always thought that being Black in America is something one has to study as an American Studies issue. Correct?