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SPI Session #1 : Where’s “the Discourse”?

October 7, 2021 5:00 pm — October 7, 2021 6:30 pm

SPI Session #1 : Where’s “the Discourse”?

From university classrooms, talk radio, and op-ed pages to Reddit, podcasts, Twitter, and more, sites of cultural conversation proliferate and grow ever more varied in scope, substance, and norms. What does it mean to cover culture or advocate change in this context? How has the emergence of so many new locations — and with them new critics and audiences — shaped, shattered, and meme-ified “the discourse”? Join the Los Angeles Review of Books for our inaugural Semipublic Intellection Session with cultural critics and writers Daphne Brooks (Liner Notes for the Revolution),  Lili Loofbourow (Slate), Sarah Marshall (You’re Wrong About), Jesse McCarthy (Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?), Lexis-Olivier Ray (L.A. Taco), on Thursday, October 7 at 5pm/8pm (PT/ET) to find out!


 


 



Daphne A. Brooks is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Music at Yale University. She is the author of Bodies in Dissent:  Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910, winner of The Errol Hill Award for Outstanding Scholarship on African American Performance from ASTR and Jeff Buckley’s Grace. Her most recent book, Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Harvard UP, 2021) is the winner of the 2021 Museum of African American History Stone Book Award. She has written liner notes to accompany the recordings of Aretha Franklin, Tammi Terrell, Prince, and Nina Simone as well as stories for the New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, and Pitchfork.



 

Lexis-Olivier Ray is a multimedia investigative staff reporter at the James Beard Award winning publication, L.A. TACO, as well as a filmmaker and artist. Based in Los Angeles, Ray has previously contributed to Men’s Health Magazine, the L.A. Times, SFGATE, LAist and KCET. Ray was a 2020 Center For Health Journalism Data Fellow and 2020 Ruben Salazar Awards finalist.

 

Lili Loofbourow is a staff writer at Slate. Prior to that, she was a culture critic at The Week. She co-founded Dear Television, and her work has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Best American Essays 2019.

 

Sarah Marshall is the co-host of the popular modern history podcast “You’re Wrong About,” which has been highlighted in The New Yorker, The Guardian, and Time magazine. Her writing has appeared in the Believer, Buzzfeed, and the true crime collection Unspeakable Acts. 

 

Jesse McCarthy is Assistant Professor in the departments of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. His articles and reviews are published or forthcoming in Transposition, African American Review, and NOVEL. He is a contributor to Richard Wright in Context, Ralph Ellison in Context (forthcoming), and The Cambridge Companion to the Essay as well as a new introduction for the Norton Library edition of W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk and an introduction for a new edition of Vincent O. Carter’s The Bern Book (Dalkey Archive, 2020). He is the author of Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? a collection of essays (Liveright, 2021), and a novel, The Fugitivities (Melville House, 2021).

 



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This event is part of LARB’s Semipublic Intellectual Sessions, a tenth anniversary celebration and fundraiser. Donate what you can to register for this event or make a contribution of $75+ to receive a full series pass, which includes automatic registration to all five events, a copy of the Semipublic Intellectual issue of the LARB Quarterly Journal, and a limited edition Semipublic Intellectual tote.

 

Download a full program guide here.