“What Can Be Represented?” a Lecture by Sharon Holland

This talk pulls from some of the arguments of my most recent publication, an other: a black feminist consideration of animal life, and also attempts to think through my current project, “Queer Eyes,” a series of essays on “outsider art” and its relationship(s) to sexuality. The lecture hopes to explore the human-centered nature of our research and our various attempts, sometimes failed, to focus away from centering ourselves. Using familiar moments from popular streaming network shows and everyday events, I will attempt to construct a sense of what can be represented, if at all.

Sharon P. Holland (she/her) is the President of the American Studies Association (2022-2025). She is also the Townsend Ludington Distinguished Professor in American Studies at the University of North Carolina @ Chapel Hill. She served as Chair of the Department from July 2020- July 2022. She is a graduate of Princeton University (1986) and holds a PhD in English and African American Studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1992).

Professor Holland’s third monograph, an other: a black feminist consideration of animal life, is an investigation of the hum/animal distinction, hum:animal relation, and the place of discourse on blackness within those theoretical discussions. You can sample the text by clicking on the following link: https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-1-4780-2507-8_601.pdf You can see her work on food, writing and all things equestrian on her blog, https://theprofessorstable.org/. Professor Holland’s next book project, Those Who Eat comes out of her decades-long work in Food Studies and is a meditation on the work of famed food writer, MFK Fisher (1908-1992).

She is the author of Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity (Duke UP,
2000), which won the Lora Romero First Book Prize from the American Studies Association
(ASA) in 2002. She is also co-author of a collection of trans-Atlantic Afro-Native criticism with Professor Tiya Miles (American Culture, Harvard) entitled Crossing Waters/ Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country (Duke University Press, 2006). Professor Holland is also responsible for bringing a feminist classic, The Queen is in the Garbage by Lila Karp to the attention of The Feminist Press for publication (2007). She is the author of The Erotic Life of Racism (Duke University Press, 2012), a theoretical project that explores the intersection of Critical Race, Feminist, and Queer Theory.

Professor Holland is the past convener and co-founder of the Critical Ethnic Studies Collective (fall 2019-spring 2021) https://criticalethnicstudies.unc.edu/. She is also co-founder of the QTIPOC Survival Fund (2020-23) https://qtipocfundchcbro.weebly.com/, a partnership with community organizers to redistribute wealth and foster self-determination among our most vulnerable members of the community. The fund has given over 200K to QTIPOC people and actively partnered with EqualityNC and local businesses to support QTIPOC lives. The Fund was recognized for its excellence by the Orange County Rape Crisis Center with the 2021 Teal Ribbon Award and partnered with that organization on a federal grant to enhance outreach and care for transgendered clients. We have been supported by numerous grants, among them, the Third Wave Fund and Southern Vision Alliance. The QTIPOC Survival Fund has worked on fundraising and activist campaigns across other mutual aid and QTIPOC groups in the state.

She is also the founder of QTIPOC Forever Home (2022), a land-based project to produce
sustainable, self-determining community for QTIPOC elders, organizers, and activists. Launched in the fall of 2022, Forever Home houses “The Cauldron,” our food justice project dedicated to moving the work of QTIPOC chefs, cooks and culinary artists into the communities that need them by providing nutritiously dense food to community members and partnering with organizations who want to do the same.

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