American/Diaspora

In Person Only: The session will be held fully in person at the hotel. No remote presentations will be included.

John Hadlock (Duquesne University)

As its title indicates, this seminar will take a broad geographic and temporal view of the Harlem or New Negro Renaissance to invite considerations of the historicity and historiography of Black writing at the turn of the twentieth century. Seminar participants will be invited to consider how history shaped and was shaped by Black art, literature, and thought in the period stretching from approximately the end of Reconstruction through the Civil Rights era. How did Black writers, artists, and thinkers use historical concepts, forms, narratives, figures, events, philosophies, discourses, and other materials to craft original works of art and literature? How did the works of “post-Bellum, pre-Harlem” Black artists, writers, and thinkers (such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Charles W. Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Anna Julia Cooper, and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins) influence and shape twentieth century artistic and literary works? How did historiographic works contribute to the broader treatment of Black life and to understandings of the “New Negro”? How do the works of the Black Renaissance confront their own contemporary moment with a sense of historical import, rupture, or continuity? What artistic and literary forms did these writers borrow from history, and to what ends? How did the sense of a “Renaissance” as a historical formation shape Black visual, musical, plastic, and written artworks? How do historicist and materialist readings of these works further our understanding of this moment, its art and thought?

The aim of this seminar (and the impetus behind the seminar format) is twofold: to generate the seeds of new scholarship in Harlem Renaissance studies and to foment scholarly community focused on Harlem Renaissance studies. Priority will be given to papers that represent new avenues of thinking and investigate understudied works in this field.

This seminar invites participants to draw connections between historical periods and investigate historical materials to generate new thinking about the art and literature of the Black Renaissance at the turn of the twentieth century. Seminar participants will be invited to consider how history shaped and was shaped by Black art, literature, and thought in the period stretching from approximately the end of Reconstruction through the Civil Rights era.