Critical Grooves Book Lab

704 1st Avenue North,Fargo ND 58102

22 September, 2022

Description

For our second iteration, we will read the award-winning mystery writer, Barbara Neely’s four-book Blanche White series. Neely was named the 202 Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America. Described as unflinching and groundbreaking, Neely’s Blanche White series is the first ever Black woman detective series, wherein the protagonist uses her invisibility as a domestic worker in the houses of the genteel Southern families in the pursuit of truth. If Neely’s four-book detective series sounds compelling, come join us at Plains Art Museum. Light refreshments and beverages will be provided. Feel free to bring your own food/snacks, too. Plains Art Museum’s Voices of Creative Change Initiative (VCCI) continues its community-oriented, book group, Critical Grooves Book Lab, for a second term (Fall 2022). Critical Grooves Book Lab is a community-oriented, book-discussion forum. 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, 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 insistence that there can be no "social justice" without global cognitive justice. , Critical Grooves Book Lab believes that the F-M Area, too, can articulate forms of cognitive justice by practicing radical conviviality and intellectual exchange in the artistic and hospitable space at the Plains Art Museum. The Book Lab’s format is simple: a brief introductions, introduction to the text/author, 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 shallow pop-culture 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.