Award-winning author and essayist David Shields screens and discusses his latest project, MARSHAWN LYNCH: A HISTORY, a documentary film about retired NFL superstar Marshawn Lynch. Shields is joined by Gerald Graff, Emeritus Professor of English and Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The screening will be followed by a discussion and breif Q&A period, time permitting.
About the film:
Marshawn Lynch: A History is a kaleidoscopic look at NFL star Marshawn Lynch and his use of silence as a form of protest. Culling more than 700 video clips and placing them in dramatic, rapid, and radical juxtaposition, the film is a powerful political parable about the American media-sports complex and its deep complicity with racial oppression.
Lynch: A History documents and celebrates Lynch’s attempt to be true to himself in a capitalist, racist society that wants to exploit him and that he wants to both exploit and oppose. Lynch is leaving a legacy of the eloquence of silence, echo, and mimicry as key tools of defiance. Albert Camus says, “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very very existence is an act of rebellion.” No one is absolutely free, but Marshawn Lynch comes thrillingly close.
DAVID SHIELDS is the internationally bestselling author of twenty-two books, including Reality Hunger (named one of the best books of 2010 by more than thirty publications), The Thing about Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (New York Times bestseller), Black Planet (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award) and Other People: Takes & Mistakes (NYTBR Editors' Choice. Nobody Hates Trump More than Trump: An Intervention was published in 2018 and The Trouble With Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power appeared in March 2019. The film adaptation of I Think You're Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, which Shields co-wrote and co-stars in, was released in 2017 (available now on Amazon); Shields wrote, produced, and directed Lynch: A History. A recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships and a senior contributing editor of Conjunctions, Shields has published fiction and nonfiction in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Esquire, Yale Review, Salon, Slate, Tin House, A Public Space, McSweeney's, Believer, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Best American Essays. His books have been translated into two dozen languages.
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