LGBTQ+ History Month: Second Annual Potash Keynote: Seth Davis G’18, Ph.D., “Shade and Trade: Black Queer Literacies of Survival”

The campus community is invited to join Seth Davis G’18, Ph.D., to explore research conducted during the 2013 Washington, D.C., Black Gay Pride and 2017 Harlem Pride, focusing specifically on Black queer people’s understanding of three terms: “reading,” “throwing shade” and “‘pullin’ trade.” In this lecture, Davis argues that Black queer people practice what he calls “fierce literacies”—that is, a type of oppositional consciousness that allow Black queer people to riff off of static ideas of language and literacy to both communicate with and create community amongst friends. He places research participants in conversation with other Black queer voices in popular culture in order to illustrate these practices as a part of a distinct literacy in the Black queer community.