This presentation is culled from The Afromantic: Black Love Out Yonder, a book-length cultural history, critical theory, aesthetic expression, and existential assertion of B/black love outside. The project will follow black love to cookouts, carnivals, rooftops, rallies, jazz funerals, cruising spots, garden plots, hush harbors, distant stars, and forest clearings—emphasizing ways of loving that escape and exceed normative enclosures of Western modernity. In a public sphere overrun with spectacles of black death outside, I plan to compile a counter-archive and counter-narrative of B/black love that can breathe under open sky, in the open air.

La Marr Jurelle Bruce is a philosopher, fever dreamer, interdisciplinary humanities scholar, first-generation college graduate, and Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Much of his scholarship explores and activates B/black, queer, and mad expressive cultures—spanning literature, music, film, theatre, and the art and aesthetics of quotidian life. Dr. Bruce’s writing is featured or forthcoming in African American Review, American Quarterly, The Black Scholar, GLQ, Social Text, TDR, and several anthologies. His debut book, How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity (2021), earned the Modern Language Association’s First Book Prize.

WINTER 2025 COLLOQUIUM SERIES

THE CENTER FOR CULTURAL STUDIES hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work-in-progress by faculty & visitors. We are pleased to announce our Winter 2025 Series. Sessions begin promptly at 12:15 PM and end at 1:30 PM (PST) in Humanities Building 1, Room 210.

Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.