Nov. 7
6:00–9:30 pm
Harper Theater
5238 S. Harper Ave.
Twenty-five years after the development of the “reproductive justice” framework in Chicago, Cinema 53 partners with the Chicago Abortion Fund to consider the complex experiences that constitute “RJ” today. The three-part series, “Freedom, Autonomy, Access: 25 Years of Reproductive Justice,” brings together organizers, scholars, artists, and health workers to view ground-breaking films and explore the critical inheritance and vital future of the movement for reproductive justice.
Majestic, confounding and rich with secrets, Beloved, based on Toni Morrison‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1987 novel, is the enduring story of Sethe, a mother determined to “never run from another thing on earth.” Followed by conversation with Charlene Carruthers, author of Unapologetic: A Black, Queer and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements, and Kaneesha Parsard, UChicago English Language and Literature, moderated by Quenna Lené Barrett, theater performer, director, and writer. (1998, Jonathan Demme, 172min)
Charlene Carruthers is a strategist, writer, and leading community organizer in today’s movement for Black liberation. She is the founder of the Chicago Center for Leadership and Transformation and author of Unapologetic: A Black, Queer and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements.
Kaneesha Cherelle Parsard is a Provost's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago, where from 2020 she will be an assistant professor. She is a scholar of Caribbean literature and visual arts, particularly their representations of the aftermath of slavery and Asian indenture. For her, gender and sexuality are key to these formations. Her scholarship has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies and can be found in Small Axe, American Quarterly, and Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought.