Kamau Brathwaite’s “Sycorax video style” with Gerardo Ismael Madera and Bryce Wilner

Join us on Thursday, January 22 at 7pm for two brief presentations on the work of the Barbadian poet, historian, and critic Kamau Brathwaite (1930–2020). Gerardo Ismael Madera and Bryce Wilner will focus on Brathwaite’s “Sycorax video style,” the dense, technical, and textured computer typography he began incorporating into his writing process in the late 1980s. Wilner will lecture on Brathwaite’s monumental book conVERSations with Nathaniel Mackey, and Madera will read from a recent essay informed by Brathwaite’s theory of “tidalectics.” This event marks the launch of Madera’s web publication Did you know that a wave is a dynamic system in catastrophe?, published by Screen Door.

The program is presented as part of that that, which transforms CARA into an expanded bookstore environment. In the weeks preceding our spring exhibition of the Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant’s (1928–2011) personal art collection, we present a series of book launches, readings, and conversations shaped by the poetic force that animates Glissant’s chapter “That That” in his book Poetics of Relation.

Gerardo Ismael Madera is an artist and educator based in New York.

Bryce Wilner is a graphic designer, writer, and educator based in New York.

Image: Kamau Brathwaite, DreamStories (Trincity: Longman, 1994), pp. 66–67