Distinguished Voices in Literature
Distinguished Voices in Literature, SUNY Cortland's Visiting Writers series, brings poets, authors, and scholars to campus for readings and lectures. All events are free and open to the public.
Fall 2024
Dr. Delali Kumavie
“Airplanes and the Archives of Technological Violence: Reading Ralph Ellison’s Early Short Stories”
Tuesday, October 29, 2024
4:30 p.m.
Old Main Colloquium (220)
This paper examines the airplane in Ralph Ellison’s early short stories, “A Party Down at the Square” and “Flying Home” as an archive of early twentieth century conflicts over the changing scape of technology and black existence. As the development of new materials facilitated leaps in aviation development and the attendant transformation of aeriality, it also affected the conditions of black life and death in the US. In Ellison’s stories, these aerial transformations function as an alternative archive where the confluence of twentieth century US and its increasing social upheavals are animated by the juxtaposition between the remnants of previous centuries' racial violence alongside the technological ethos of the jet-age. In both stories, the airplane is positioned in unexpected new loci, where it documents, however fleetingly, early twentieth-century US as it grapples with the transformations of technological modernity.
Delali Kumavie has always been fascinated by how people travel across national borders. Born in Ghana and raised in Norway, she earned her B.A. from the University of Ghana, and her doctorate from Northwestern University. She was a Carter G. Woodson predoctoral fellow at the University of Virginia, and a Mahindra Humanities Center postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of English at Syracuse University. Her research and teaching interests are in African and African Diasporic literature, Studies in Transportation, Studies in Migration, Globalization, and Transnationality. Her current book project, Aerial Imaginaries: Flight and Aviation in Global Black Literature examines imaginaries of air and actual technology and infrastructure of aviation in Global Black literature. The book contends that Black literature and culture indexes a continued unease between the legacies of slavery and colonialism and the seemingly unimpeded mobility of globalism. Black writers and artists across Africa and the African Diaspora have interrogated the ways aviation technology, its imaginaries, infrastructure, and space constitute a crucial site to contend with the contradictions of a globalizing world. Delali’s work has been published in PMLA, Feminist Africa, Substance, Qui Parle, Propter Nos, and Postcolonial Text. She is the co-editor for a special issue of English Language Notes on “Expanding Black and Indigenous Ecologies,” and a special section in Transfers on “Black Aeromobilities: Engaging Flight in African and Afrodiasporic Cultural Texts”.
Spring 2025
Jamaica Baldwin
Reading by Poet, Jamaica Baldwin
Jamaica Baldwin (she/her) is a poet and educator originally from Santa Cruz, CA. Her first book, Bone Language, was published by YesYes Books in June 2023. Her work has appeared in Guernica, World Literature Today, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, and The Missouri Review, among others. Her accolades include a 2023 Pushcart Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a RHINO Poetry editor's prize, a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, as well as the San Miguel de Allende Writer's Conference Contest Poetry Award.
Jamaica has also served as a community based teaching artist with Writers in the Schools - Seattle, Louder Than a Bomb - Great Plains (an affiliate of Nebraska Writers Collective), and taught a generative writing workshop for women in Guatemala. Her writing has been supported by Aspen Words, Storyknife, Hedgebrook, Furious Flower, and the Jack Straw Writers program. Jamaica has a PhD from the University of Nebraska -Lincoln in English with a focus on poetry and Women's and Gender Studies and she is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Writing at Ithaca College in New York.
Distinguished Voices in Literature events are supported by the President’s Office, the Haines Fund, the Provost’s Office, the Cortland College Foundation, the Dean’s office, Cultural and Intellectual Climate Committee, CAS, the Writing Center, and the English Department.
For questions please contact Heather Bartlett (heather.bartlett@cortland.edu) or Danica Savonick (danica.savonick@cortland.edu)