Sweet Willie Rollbar's Orientation: Screening and Talk with Brent Hayes Edwards

Sweet Willie Rollbar's Orientation is an experimental film shot in 1972 by the saxophonist Julius Hemphill, the poet K. Curtis Lyle, the actor Malinke Elliott and other members of the Black Artists’ Group of St. Louis. Made in part with funding from Wash. U., the film is an astonishing document of the post-Black Arts moment, a series of fragmented, surreal “trickster tale” vignettes set in the detritus of the St. Louis ghetto. Brent Hayes Edwards, who has produced a digital restoration of the film from the original 16mm reels (mixing the footage with an original soundtrack recorded by Hemphill), will place the film in the context of the Black Artists’ Group in St. Louis and more broadly in relation to other Black experimental currents in the early 1970s.

Brent Hayes Edwards is the Peng Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He writes and teaches on topics including African American literature, Francophone literature, theories of the African diaspora, translation studies, archive theory, black radical historiography, cultural politics in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, surrealism, experimental poetics, and jazz. His most recent books include Ecrire le monde noir (Rot-Bo-Krik, 2024), a collection of the interwar writings of the pioneering Martinican intellectual Paulette Nardal, and Easily Slip into Another World (Knopf, 2023), the co-written autobiography of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Henry Threadgill, which was awarded a 2024 American Book Award and a 2024 Jazz Journalists Association Book of the Year Award for Biography or Autobiography. Since 2021 he has served as the editor of PMLA, the flagship journal of the Modern Language Association.