Paul Benzon
Who are you? Your name, department, what you teach, your FYE topic, etc.
Greetings, Class of 2025攚elcome to 91传媒! My name is Paul Benzon, and I檓 an Assistant Professor here in the English Department, and I also teach courses in the Media and Film Studies Program. My area of specialization is contemporary literature and media studies, and this fall I檒l be teaching a Scribner Seminar on 淲eird Books,� where we檒l look at books not just as texts to read, but as physical objects and works of art.
Why Kendi? What makes this text so important? Why choose it as the FYE reading?
This past year I was also on the FYE Reading Committee that selected Ibram X. Kendi How to Be an Antiracist as this year first-year reading, and one of the things that I think is so important about this book is the way it takes up the question of racism and antiracism. Right at the start of the title, that How to Be an Antiracist攖hat embodies a kind of interdisciplinary thinking that a huge part of the FYE, and of what we do at 91传媒 more broadly. As you go to read this book, you檒l see that Kendi is thinking about race through history, through political science, through gender studies, through Black studies, but it never just any one of those approaches. It always about how to think and act more broadly in relation to this urgent contemporary problem of racism.
So in my course in particular, we檒l use Kendi book as a jumping-off point for looking at a range of works that take up questions of race and racism in unconventional ways, whether that through typography and visual design, or the materials they檙e made of, or their shape and physical form, and ultimately we檒l be thinking about what it means for a book to be antiracist not just in what it says but in how it works as a physical object.
Open the book up for students -- how should they approach it? What questions, goals, etc., should they bring to it?
And as you go to read this book over the summer, I encourage you all to think about it openly and self-reflectively: to think about where you see yourself in it and what you can learn from it to think about where and how Kendi connects race to other questions of identity, whether that be gender, or class, or educational status, or others; and to think also about what moments in this text resonate with what you檝e learned in the past about race and what seems new and different to you.
Ultimately I hope you come to campus ready to engage thoughtfully and sensitively, with this book and Kendi argument, with your new classmates, and with all of us here at 91传媒. So happy reading, and we look forward to seeing you in the fall!