Body Image
4:30PM | A Conversation with Mecca Jamilah Sullivan (Author of Big Girl) and Artist Baseera Khan, moderated by Prof. Nadia Brown.
If a body could speak, what would it say? The way our bodies are viewed and categorized is not always within our power. A writer and a visual artist reflect upon representing, in words and images, the experiences which come with existing in bodies: black, brown, queer, female, Muslim, big – defined by systems of power beyond our control.
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Ph.D. is the author of the novel Big Girl (W.W. Norton & Co. 2022), a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection and a best books pick from Time, Essence, Vulture, Ms., Goodreads, Library Reads, and SheReads.com. Her previous books are The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora (University of Illinois Press, 2021), and the short story collection, Blue Talk and Love (2015), winner of the Judith Markowitz Award for Fiction from Lambda Literary. Her writing has appeared in Best New Writing, Kenyon Review, American Fiction, Prairie Schooner, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, The Cut, American Literary History, Black Futures, American Quarterly, GLQ: Lesbian and Gay Studies Quarterly, Ebony, The Root, and others, and has earned honors from the Center for Fiction, the American Association of University Women, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her novel, Big Girl, was a Phenomenal Book Club pick and a WNYC 2022 Debut selection. Of the novel, author and activist Janet Mock observes: “Big Girl gifts us a heroine carrying the weight of worn-out ideas who dares to defy the compulsion to shrink, and in turn teaches us to pursue our fullest, most desirous selves without shame,” while author Kiese Laymon says: “There are three books on earth that I would give anything to be able to write and reread until the sun burns us up. Big Girl is one of those books […] a new American classic that we as a country and a culture desperately need.”
Mecca is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University. Born and raised in Harlem, New York, she currently lives in Washington, DC.
Baseera Khan is a New York-based performance, sculpture, and installation artist who makes work to discuss materials and their economies, the effects of this relationship to labor, family structures, religion, and spiritual well being. Khan is currently working on a public art commission on The High Line for fall 2023. Khan mounted their first museum solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York (2021-22), and opened their first solo touring exhibition in Houston, Texas at Moody Arts Center for the Arts, Rice University (2022-2023). Khan is a recipient of the UOZO Art Prize (2020), BRIC Colene Brown Art Prize and the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant (2019), was granted by both NYSCA/NYFA and Art Matters (2018). Their works are part of several public permanent collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim, Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, MN, and the New Orleans Museum of Art, LA. Khan’s work is published in 4Columns, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Art in America, BOMB, Brooklyn Rail, and TDR Drama Review. Khan is an adjunct professor of sculpture, performance, and critical theory, and received an M.F.A. from Cornell University (2012) and a B.F.A. from the University of North Texas (2005).