Overview
Colin Stragar-Rice is a PhD student with the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell. In general, his research explores the relation between aesthetics and politics in the Black radical tradition of the 1960s and ‘70s. In his dissertation, he uses Hortense Spillers’s 1994 essay “Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date” to build a framework for engaging three distinct fields of inquiry: the Black radical tradition of the 1960s and ‘70s, Black feminist literary criticism of the ‘90s and contemporary Black studies. With this framework, he interrogates what Spillers terms the “explosive potential in the theoretical object” of Black study as a practice of reading and writing. Finally, through readings of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” Toni Morrison’s “Sula,” Alice Childress’s “A Short Walk” as well as the intellectual exchanges between Angela Davis and George Jackson, Colin considers the status of the explosive potential of the theoretical object of Black study for Walter Rodney’s figure of the guerrilla intellectual and Amílcar Cabral’s problematic of suicide as a class.