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VERSION:2.0
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X-WR-CALNAME:MIT Literature Section presents\, Lara Cohen "'To Drop beneath
  the Floors of the Outer World': Paschal Beverly Randolph's Occult Undergr
 ounds"
X-WR-TIMEZONE:Eastern Time (US & Canada)
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20260910T161550Z
UID:tag:localist.com\,2008:EventInstance_42464772128822
DTSTART:20230309T221500Z
DTEND:20230309T231500Z
DESCRIPTION:Presented by: Lara Cohen\nAssociate Professor in English Litera
 ture Swarthmore College\n\nWhen: Thursday\, March 9th @ 5:15PM\nWhere: Bui
 lding 14\, Room 14E-304\n\nAbstract: This talk focuses on Paschal Beverly 
 Randolph (1825-1875)\, self-described “angular and eccentric” writer\,
  Freedmen’s Bureau teacher\, occultist\, and sex magician. Antiblackness
  thwarted Randolph at every turn in his short life\, but he contended that
  his experiences of alienation and hyperawareness had cultivated spiritual
  sensitivities that allowed him to access an unseen universe. Randolph wro
 te numerous handbooks\, pamphlets\, novels\, memoirs\, newspaper articles\
 , and manifestos expounding his occult thought. He also sought to build cl
 andestine communities around it\, founding a series of secret societies an
 d circulating a subterranean repertoire of pamphlets\, handwritten manuscr
 ipts\, formulas\, and correspondence that taught the curious how to use th
 eir bodies to make contact with the spirit realms through sex\, drugs\, an
 d ritual. While Randolph’s in-person and textual undergrounds seem mostl
 y to have failed in practice\, his writings offer an extraordinary theory 
 of the underground\, which envisioned it as a portal to a cosmos whose for
 ces might be brought to transform the order of things on earth. In this ta
 lk\, I highlight the political dimensions of Randolph’s esoteric theorie
 s and consider how his dreams of other worlds\, above and below our own\, 
 reflect the unfulfilled promises of Emancipation.\n\nBio: Lara Langer Cohe
 n is Associate Professor of English at Swarthmore College. She is the auth
 or of Going Underground: Race\, Space\, and the Subterranean (Duke Univers
 ity Press\, 2023) and The Fabrication of American Literature: Fraudulence 
 and Antebellum Print Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press\, 2012)\, a
 nd co-editor\, with Jordan Alexander Stein\, of Early African American Pri
 nt Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press\, 2012).
GEO:42.358576;-71.089568
LOCATION:Building 14\, 14E-304
SUMMARY:MIT Literature Section presents\, Lara Cohen "'To Drop beneath the 
 Floors of the Outer World': Paschal Beverly Randolph's Occult Undergrounds
 "
URL;VALUE=URI:https://calendar.mit.edu/event/lara_cohen_to_drop_beneath_the
 _floors_of_the_outer_world
CATEGORIES:Conferences/Seminars/Lectures
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