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 earned her B.A. in Sociology from Spelman College, with concentrations in comparative women's studies and African Diaspora & the World. Her research interests include Black aesthetics and culture, Black internationalism, and Afrodiasporic consciousness movements. Her current work is a cultural history and exploration of Afro-Surrealism throughout the Black Radical Tradition, emphasizing 20th-century U.S. and Francophone Caribbean art and activism. She holds graduate fellowships and affiliations with the Pembroke Center for Research and Teaching on Women, the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, and the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America. In addition to her graduate work, Melaine is a poet and curator committed to bridging gaps between academia and the Providence community. She enjoys jazz and soul music, language learning, and comedy. Melaine is a recipient of the Brown University Mae Belle Williamson Simmons Diversity Fellowship.

Host or Publisher Symposium Books Staff