Author Reading and Talkback with Stephen Clingman of University Massachusetts at Amherst
“Birthmark: Divided Vision & the Coming of Perspective”
Thursday October 26, 2017 4:30 p.m.
Stern Lounge Austin 217
Professor STEPHEN CLINGMAN will read from Birthmark (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), a memoir of divided vision in the divided world of apartheid South Africa. When Stephen was two, he underwent an operation to remove a birthmark under his right eye. The operation failed, and the birthmark returned. Clingman takes the fact of that mark — its appearance, disappearance, and return — as a guiding motif of memory. In a beguiling narrative set on three continents, this is a story that is personal, painful, comic, and ultimately uplifting: a book not so much of the coming of age but the coming of perspective.
Stephen Clingman is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts. He is also the author of Bram Fischer: Afrikaner Revolutionary, which won the Alan Paton Award, South Africa’s premier prize for non-fiction.
Copies of Birthmark will be available for purchase and may be personalized at this open to the public event. Contact Barnes & Noble at Storrs Center to order your copy in advance.
Presented by the Asian and Asian American Studies Institute and Co-sponsored by the Department of English.
The event is open and free to the public.
For more information, contact: Cathy Schlund-Vials at cathy.schlund-vials@uconn.edu