Robert F. Reid-Pharr: What We Dare Not Remember — Jonestown and the "Mattering" of Black Life

'Professor Robert Reid-Pharr asks, why, in a period in U.S. history in which questions of Black life and Black death are at the center of our public debates, have so few intellectuals taken up the matter of the 918 individuals, most of whom were African American, who died in a mass suicide in "Jonestown," Guyana in 1978? Reading the details of the events against works of fiction and poetry by Wilson Harris and Pat Parker, Reid-Pharr asks how we might develop new forms of memorialization that name-and value-both the victors and the victims, the noble and the vulgar. Reid-Phar is Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of four books: Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American, Oxford University Press, 1999; Black, Gay, Man: Essays, New York University Press, 2001; Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual, New York University Press, 2007; and Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post Humanist Critique, New York University Press, 2016.' -- Duke Franklin Humanities Institute