James B. Haile III discusses "The Dark Delight of Being Strange"

Join us on April 11th at 6pm as we host Professor James B. Haile III, who will be discussing his book, The Dark Delight of Being Strange, with Melaine Ferdinand-King. Signed copies of the book will be available for purchase. About the book: An ambitious genre-crossing exploration of Black speculative imagination, The Dark Delight of Being Strange combines fiction, historical accounts, and philosophical prose to unveil the extraordinary and the surreal in everyday Black life. In a series of stories and essays, James B. Haile, III, traces how Black speculative fiction responds to enslavement, racism, colonialism, and capitalism and how it reveals a life beyond social and political alienation. He reenvisions Black technologies of freedom through Henry Box Brown’s famed escape from slavery in a wooden crate, fashions an anticolonial “hollow earth theory” from the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, and considers the octopus and its ability to camouflage itself as a model for Black survival strategies, among others. Looking at Black life through the lens of speculative fiction, this book transports readers to alternative worlds and spaces while remaining squarely rooted in present-day struggles. In so doing, it rethinks historical and contemporary Black experiences as well as figures such as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Henry Dumas, and Toni Morrison. Offering new ways to grasp the meanings and implications of Black freedom, The Dark Delight of Being Strange invites us to reimagine history and memory, time and space, our identities and ourselves. About the author: James B. Haile, III is an Afrosurrealist and Afrofuturist writer and aspiring collage artist. Currently, Haile holds the Jane Cotton Ebbs Endowed Professor in Philosophy at the University of Rhode Island, where he is also an Associate professor of Philosophy with a joint appointment in English. He is the author of The Buck, the Black, and the Existential Hero: Refiguring the Black Male Literary Canon,1850 to Present (2020), and author of the recently released book, The Dark Delight of Being Strange: Black Stories of Freedom, which has won the 2025 Hugh J. Silverman Book Award from the Association of Philosophy and Literature and has been placed on the Longlist for the 2025 Pen Open Book Award. About the moderator: Melaine Ferdinand-King is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University. Her dissertation explores Afrosurrealism as a vital but underexamined tradition in U.S. and Caribbean thought and culture. In tracing its presence through twentieth-century theory, literature, and art, she underscores valuable strategies for making sense of our increasingly surreal world today. As a cultural worker, Melaine’s interests lie in the use of experimentation and radical imagination toward new forms of civic engagement. She holds a B.A. in Sociology from Spelman College and an M.A. from Brown University. In her leisure, Melaine appreciates stand-up comedy, soul and jazz music, and writing poetry.

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Website: https://go.evvnt.com/2995938-0

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