W.E.B. Du Bois Lecture: Thomas Heise

Thomas Heise (Pennsylvania State University, Abington):

“Reading Space: Literature, Capital, Geography”

Thomas Heise will reflect on the spatial imagination of U.S. literature in relation to changing modes of production, histories of uneven urban development and practices of segregation, ghettoization, zoning, redlining, and gentrification. His talk will read U.S. fiction for its narratives of place and its depictions of urban life, but also for how novels respond formally to the representational challenges that the urban environment poses as its spatiality changes and its social complexity multiplies in the wake of capital’s shifting needs and technologies. In what ways are gender, sexual, and racial identities spatially constituted in a work of literature? What is a novel’s geographical imaginary at the neighborhood, urban, national, or global level? His talk will attempt to address questions such as how human sociospatial practices are interwoven through time to create the geographies of the built environment as well as the geographies of memory, culture, and everyday life.