Arlene Keizer

Arlene Keizer, Professor and former Chairperson of Humanities and Media Studies, is a scholar in the fields of literary and cultural studies, critical theory, feminist theory–especially Black feminist theory–and psychoanalysis. She is the author of the monograph Black Subjects: Identity Formation in the Contemporary Narrative of Slavery (Cornell UP), as well as book chapters and articles in a range of journals including American Literature, PMLA, African American Review, and Radical Teacher. Keizer holds a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley and a master’s degree in English and Creative Writing from Stanford University. In addition to her scholarly work, she has published poetry, film reviews, and experimental criticism. Her first poetry collection, Fraternal Light: On Painting While Black, won the 2022 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize and was published in the Wick Poetry Series in 2023.

Prior to her arrival at Pratt, Keizer spent 20 years teaching African American, Caribbean, and American literature and culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Brown University, and the University of California, Irvine. Her administrative service, for these universities and the profession at large, has included extensive work reviewing manuscripts and degree programs, serving as an equity advisor, and directing the PhD Program in Culture and Theory at UCI. This East Coast native, born to emigrants from Trinidad, has made Brooklyn her home.

PhD, University of California, Berkeley
MA, Stanford University
BA, Princeton University

BOOKS

Fraternal Light: On Painting While Black (Poems for Beauford Delaney). Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2023. Winner of the 2022 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize.

New Black Feminist Criticism, 1985-2000, Barbara Christian. Co-edited with Gloria Bowles and M. Giulia Fabi. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2007.

Black Subjects: Identity Formation in the Contemporary Narrative of Slavery. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004.

JOURNAL ARTICLES AND CONTRIBUTIONS TO BOOKS

“Collateral Survivorship.” Radical Teacher 114—Radical Teaching Then and Now (Summer 2019): 48-50.

“What Will the Art of Freedom Look Like?: Casey Ruble’s ‘Deformation of Mastery’.” Essay for Red Summer, Artist’s Book by Casey Ruble [Edition of 100], Conveyor Editions, 2019.

“Epiphany: Marianetta Porter’s Black Feminist, Folk-Conceptual Art.” Essay for Color Code exhibition catalogue, GalleryDAAS, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, March 2016, 8-11.

“The Bone Alphabet: A ‘First Reading’ of M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! #6.” Jacket2 (February 2014). http://jacket2.org/commentary/first-reading-m-nourbese-philips-zong-6-2

“‘Obsidian Mine’: The Psychic Aftermath of Slavery.” Samuel R. Delany special issue of American Literary History 24.4 (October 2012): 686-701.

“Incidents in the Lives of Two Postmodern Black Feminists: An Interview with Harryette Mullen.” Postmodern Culture 22.1: n.p.

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v022/22.1.mullen.html

“‘Our Posteriors, Our Posterity’: The Problem of Embodiment in Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus and Kara Walker’s Camptown Ladies.” ‘Scripted Bodies’ special issue of Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies 37.2 (October 2011): 200-212.

“African American Literature and Psychoanalysis.” A Companion to African American Literature. Ed. Gene Andrew Jarrett. Oxford: Blackwell, 2010: 410-20. Paperback, 2013.

“Gone Astray in the Flesh: Kara Walker, Black Women Writers, and African American Postmemory.” PMLA 123.5 (October 2008): 1649-72.

“Black Feminist Criticism.” A History of Feminist Literary Criticism. Ed. Gill Plain and Susan Sellers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007: 154-68.

“The Geography of the Apocalypse: Incest, Mythology, and the Fall of Washington City in Carolivia Herron’s Thereafter Johnnie.” American Literature 72.2 (June 2000): 387-416.

“Beloved: Ideologies in Conflict, Improvised Subjects.” African American Review 33.1 (Spring 1999): 105-23.

“African American Poetry, Religious and Didactic, from 1760 to the Present.” The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Ed. William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

POETRY

“Canopy.” Poem-a-Day: The Academy of American Poets (online, February 7, 2023).

“Jazz Epistle, Verse 1,” “John & Harriet Tubman, 1844,” “The Law,” “Writing You from a Plague Year.” Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora (forthcoming).

“Bud.” The Kenyon Review 19.3-4 (Summer/Fall 1997).

“Awkward Passions: Confessions of a Black Catholic” and “Migrants.” TriQuarterly 87 (1993): 150-53.

COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH AND EXHIBITIONS

“Red Summer Remembered: Cultural Trauma and Collaborative Art Practices.” An exhibit co-created with two visual artists—photographer Wendel White and painter Casey Ruble—commemorating the centennial of the “Red Summer” of 1919, in which Black communities across the United States were the targets of white mob violence. Pratt Institute, Brooklyn Campus Library, September 23—October 14, 2019.

“The Long Aftermath of Scottsboro”—Law and Humanities Collaborative Project—co-creator, with a professor in the UCI School of Law, of a year-long series of conversations on the Scottsboro case and its ramifications in the humanities, the arts, law, political history, and the history of global activism—2015—2016.

Slavery and Justice: The Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice. Published by Brown University, 2007. Winner of the Community & Justice Award from Rhode Island for Community & Justice (RICJ).