Critical Grooves Book Lab

704 1st Avenue North,Fargo ND 58102

28 April, 2022

Description

A community-based, discursive platform that engages with non-canonized texts (defined broadly) and practices forms of radical conviviality. Join us Thursday, April 28th, at 6:30 pm, as we travel with Ann Petry to A Country Place. Within the historical context of the hundred-year period between 1845 – 1945, which marks the emergence of what Robert Fikes, Jr. calls “white life novels,” Ann Petry’s sophisticated post-World War II novel examines presumptions about how normative identities are derived, the extent to which these normative identities are linked to the performative power of language, the presumption that these normative identities are stable enough to construct “universal” standards, and the depravity and moral turpitude that adheres to members of the upper class. Too, Petry’s sophistication is found in her ability to raise deeply vexing questions about who can tell whose story and about who assumes (and/or is granted) narrative authority in relation to a novel’s author, its characters, and its audience. A Country Place will quite possibly provide its readers with a destabilizing experience. We look forward to your insight and rigorous engagement. Light refreshments will be provided. Plains Art Museum’s Voices of Creative Change Initiative (VCCI) launched a new community-based study group called Critical Grooves Book Lab. Critical Grooves Book Lab is a community-oriented discursive platform. It fosters and encourages radical conviviality, sharing of ideas, diverse company, interesting texts, and rigorous dialogue that is both skillfully aplomb and sometimes prickly. Further, and more specifically, at its best, as a discursive platform, Critical Grooves Book Lab engages a wide array of non-canonized texts (broadly defined). It situates itself at the threshold between “common sense,” “situated knowledge,” and experiential learning. In fact, the impetus of Critical Grooves Book Lab is captured by Bonaventura de Sousa Santos’ insistence that “another knowledge is possible” which calls attention to his argument that there can be no social justice without global cognitive justice. As a discursive platform, Critical Grooves Book Lab contends that in the F-M Area, a microcosmic articulation of global community, we can articulate forms of justice through radical conviviality and an unlikely sharing in the artistic and hospitable space here at Plains Art Museum. The Book Lab’s format is simple: a brief introductory community-building activity; introduction to the text/author for that session; one or two probing questions to generate guided & robust discussions; and some secondary-source referencing (this will prove useful in thickening our discussions in ways that compel us to consider societal concerns, problems, and issues beyond mundane superficiality and pop-ish interpretations of complex human dynamics). Finally, and with a light touch, our sessions conclude with a voluntary go-around the group whereby texts are “rated” on a 1 – 10 scale (where participants have the option of voluntarily providing brief justifications/explanations for their ratings). That’s it.