ABOUT THIS EVENT

Ideas of Our Time is a virtual lecture series providing a forum for creative dialogue with artists, educators, and others around some of the most vital and important art and ideas of our time.

This month, join Badia Ahad-Legardy, author, professor, and Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs at Loyola University Chicago for a discussion on her book, Afro-Nostalgia: Feeling Good in Contemporary Black Culture. This lecture is presented in connection to Kara Walker: Cut to the Quick.

As early as the eighteenth century, white Americans and Europeans believed that people of African descent could not experience nostalgia. As a result, black lives have been predominately narrated through historical scenes of slavery and oppression. This phenomenon created a missing archive of romantic historical memories.

ABOUT BADIA AHAD-LEGARDY

Ahad-Legardy mines literature, visual culture, performance, and culinary arts to form an archive of black historical joy for use by the African-descended. Her analysis reveals how contemporary black artists find more than trauma and subjugation within the historical past. Drawing on contemporary African American culture and recent psychological studies, she reveals nostalgia’s capacity to produce positive emotions. Afro-nostalgia emerges as an expression of black romantic recollection that creates and inspires good feelings even within our darkest moments.

Badia Ahad-Legardy is Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs and Professor in the Department of English at Loyola University Chicago. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame and was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University.  Ahad-Legardy teaches courses in contemporary African American literature, cultural and memory studies. Her research considers emotions, moods, feelings that are generally overlooked in discussions of black cultural life (love, joy, pleasure, bliss).