The End of White Supremacy: An American Romance is a dramatic monologue that retells and riffs on W.E.B. Du Bois's "The Comet".
92Y's Unterberg Poetry Center will present a Thursday, April 29, 7 pm program featuring André Holland, who will give a dramatic reading of Saidiya Hartman's The End of White Supremacy: An American Romance, followed by a conversation with the author.
The event is part of the 92nd Street Y's "Almost Home" spring mini-season; For each "Almost Home" performance, 92Y will sell up to 150 in-person tickets in the 905-seat Kaufmann Concert Hall, with additional tickets available online. The End of White Supremacy: An American Romance is a dramatic monologue that retells and riffs on W.E.B. Du Bois's "The Comet" - a work of speculative fiction that imagines how it might be possible to nurture "a hope not hopeless, even if not hopeful" after environmental catastrophe befalls New York City and (temporarily) breaks the stranglehold of racism. "The Comet" was originally published in Du Bois's Darkwater, a collection of autobiographical writings, essays, songs and stories published in 1920. Hartman's Wayward Lives: Beautiful Experiments won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2019. "Her work is gorgeous and heartbreaking," wrote Daphne A. Brooks, Yale University Professor of African American and Theater Studies. "It is scholarship as art imbued with a kind of discursive simultaneity that yields both eulogy and possibility."Videos