André Holland’s dramatic reading of Saidiya Hartman’s “The End of White Supremacy: An American Romance” will take place at 92Y and online
Who: André Holland, Saidiya Hartman
What: Virtual and in-person dramatic monologue and conversation
Where: 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center, Kaufmann Concert Hall, 1395 Lexington Ave., and online
When: Thursday, April 29, $20, 7:00
Why: The 92nd St. Y is transitioning from virtual events to in-person presentations with its “Almost Home” series, in which up to 150 people can buy tickets to see the event in the Kaufmann Concert Hall while an unlimited amount can pay the same $20 price and watch on their screens at home. The spring miniseason kicks off April 29 at 7:00 with André Holland (Moonlight, The Knick) reading Saidiya Hartman’s “The End of White Supremacy: An American Romance,” a June 2020 article the American writer and academic penned for Bomb magazine. The piece is a retelling of W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1920 postapocalyptic short story, “The Comet,” along with a new interpretation of it. The tale begins:
“He watches the human swirl as it moves determinedly along Broadway. Perched at the top of the stairs, the customers and employees of the bank brush by as he hesitates near the entrance. A nod, a look of recognition, a meager hello, a begrudging acknowledgment that he exists are not forthcoming. The street is teeming with people. No one glancing casually at him would use a phrase like ‘towering figure”’ or waste a moment wondering about his position at the bank; words like idle or lingering or un-mastered or servile brush at the murky edges of consciousness, latent and without the full awareness or deliberateness of thought, because most of the men rushing through the streets of the financial center rarely perceive him. Few noticed him. Few ever noticed him except in a way that stung. He was outside the world — ‘nothing!’”
Following the reading, Holland and National Book Critics Circle Award winner Hartman (Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth Century America; Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route; Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments) will discuss the work, in which Hartman writes, “Du Bois believed that telling such stories mattered. In hindsight, he would explain this earnestness (the belief that intelligent argument and reasoned judgment might defeat racism) as a consequence of not having read psychoanalysis. He ‘was not sufficiently Freudian to understand how little human action is based on reason’ or to apprehend the deep psychic investment in racism, what others have since described as the libidinal economy of an antiblack world. He had assumed that ‘the majority of Americans would rush to the defense of democracy,’ if they realized that racism threatened it, not only for blacks, but for whites, ‘not only in America, but in the world.’”
“Almost Home” continues May 3 with “Alyson Cambridge and Friends in Concert” and May 5, 11, and 26 with a trio of shows that are part of the Marshall Weinberg Spring 2021 Classical Music Season. For all in-person events, a negative COVID-19 test or proof of vaccination is required.