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Black Theatricality: Race and Representation in Black Literature and Culture

 

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The 2010 Bildner Symposium at Dartmouth College

April 9 and 10, 2010

Featured Speakers

 

Hortense Spillers (Keynote Speaker) is Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Also a literary critic she has, over the past twenty years, enormously enriched African diasporic literary and cultural criticism. Spillers' present work at the intersection of psychoanalysis and Black feminist criticism is, like all her writing, inflected with a generous spirit and mordant wit. Publications include  Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. University of Chicago Press, Spring 2003, Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text, ed. with intro. Hortense J. Spillers. Selected Papers from the English Institute (New York: Routledge, Chapman, and Hall; 1991), and Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, eds. Hortense J. Spillers and Marjorie Pryse (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). With Afterword by Hortense J. Spillers. Picture :Courtesy Lucius T. Outlaw (Jr.)

Brent Hayes Edwards (Keynote Speaker) is  a Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and The Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard University Press, 2003), which was awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association and the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Society for French Historical Studies. With Robert G. O’Meally and Farah Jasmine Griffin, he co-edited the collection Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (Columbia University Press, 2004). Since 2001 he has served as the co-editor of the journal Social Text. His book Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination will be published by Harvard in 2011. His current projects include a translation of Michel Leiris’s L’Afrique fantôme and a cultural history of “loft jazz” in downtown New York in the 1970s. 

Sandy Alexandre is an assistant professor of American literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her interests include African American literature and culture, visual studies, and southern studies. Her first book, The Nature of Lynching: Racial Violence & Black-American Literary Pastoralism, 1890-1960, argues that African-American nature poetry attempts to interpolate a decidedly African-American version and political critique of the American pastoral ideal, both of which are founded justifiably on black agrarian slave labor as well as the cruel instances of racial violence that occurred on ostensibly peaceful, southern pastoral landscapes. Her second book project will examine the ethics and usefulness of spectacle vis-à-vis one of black theatricality's iterations as dramatic revelations of black victimization. She has published articles in the Mississippi Quarterly, Modern Drama, and has another forthcoming in Signs.

Jennifer Devere Brody is a Professor of African and African American Studies at Duke University where she teaches cultural and performance studies, gender and sexuality as well as film and literary studies. She is the author of Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity and Victorian Culture (Duke University Press, 1998) and Punctuation: Art, Politics and Play (Duke University Press, 2008).  Her work has been supported by a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Ford Foundation, a grant from the British Society for Theatre Research and was recognized by the Monette/Horwitz Trust for Independent Research to combat homophobia. Her research on race, visual culture and African American Literature has appeared in journals such as Genders, Signs, Callaloo, Theatre Journal, Text and Performance Quarterly and numerous edited volumes. Before joining the faculty at Duke, Prof. Brody was the Weinberg College Board of Visitors Research and Teaching Professor at Northwestern University.  She was also the President of the Women and Theatre Program, a division of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.  She serves on several boards and works with MLA, ASA, and ATHE.

Daphne A. Brooks is an Associate Professor of English and African- American Studies at Princeton University where she teaches courses on African-American literature and culture, performance studies, critical gender studies, and popular music culture.  She is the author of two books: Bodies in Dissent:  Performing Race, Gender, and Nation in the Trans-Atlantic Imaginary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006),  winner of the The Errol Hill Award for Outstanding Scholarship on African American Performance from ASTR. and Jeff Buckley's Grace (New York: Continuum, 2005).  She is also the editor of The Great Escapes: The Narratives of William Wells Brown, Henry Box Brown, and William Craft, (New York:  Barnes & Noble Classics, 2007) and The Black Performing Arts volume of The Black Experience in the Western Hemisphere series, eds. Howard Dodson and Colin Palmerr (New York: Pro-Quest Information & Learning, 2006). Brooks is currently working on a new book entitled Subterranean Blues: Black Feminist Musical Subcultures from the Minstrelsy to the Post-Hip Hop Era (Harvard University Press, forthcoming).

Glenda Carpio is Professor of African and African American Studies and English at Harvard University. Her book, Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery was recently published by Oxford University Press. The third chapter from the book was published in American Litertaure in 2005. She is currently working on a book tentatively entitled Ambivalent Alliances:Black and Latina/o Fiction in the Americas, which includes a chapter on Junot Diaz's novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Professor Carpio started her teaching career in Compton, California where she taught 8th grade English and 4th grade through the Teach for America program. She recently received Harvard University's Abramson Award for Excellence and Sensitivity in Undergraduate Teaching.

Soyica Diggs Colbert is Assistant Professor of English at Dartmouth. Her interests are black theatre, literature, performance, and culture, and women's and gender studies. Currently Colbert is working on two book projects. The first entitled Black Theatrical Reparations argues for the centrality of black performance traditions expressed in the cakewalking, preaching, hustling, migrating, practicing rituals (e.g, dancing the juba and making blood sacrifices), and singing the blues and gospel to African American Literature. These performance traditions create the "performative ground" of African American literary texts. Using the physical space of the theater and the discursive one of the page, W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, August Wilson, and Suzan-Lori Parks deploy performances to resituate black people in time and space. In Black Theatrical Reparations, she contends that throughout the twentieth century, African American dramatists stage black performances in their plays as acts of recuperation and restoration, creating sites that have the potential to repair the damage caused by slavery and its aftermath. The second entitled Black Movements: Performance, Politics, and Migration examines multiple meanings of movement (i.e. migration, immigration, community activism, and embodied performance) in black literature and cultural productions to bring studies of black diaspora into conversation with theorizations of black performance. She has published articles on James Baldwin, Alice Childress, and August Wilson.

Margo Natalie Crawford is the author of Dilution Anxiety and the Black Phallus (2008), a study of the body politics of lighter and darker-skinned blackness, and the co-editor, with Lisa Gail Collins, of New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement (2006). She is an associate professor in the Department of English at Cornell University. A key figure in the recent wave of scholarship on the 1960s and early 1970s Black Arts movement, she is now completing Words, Images, Black Power, and Post-Black Play. This current work compares the performance and play in the Black Arts movement and 21st century African American literature and visual culture.

José dos Santos is an Assistant Professor of Literatures in English at the Federal University of Minas Gerais – Brazil.  He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Purdue University with a focus in literature, philosophy and culture.   His primary interests are 19th century American and 20th African-American literature, literary theory and cultural studies.  He has published articles in 19th century American fiction and the short story in Brazil and the United States.  He is co-editor of Migrações Teóricas, Interlocuções Culturais: Estudos Comparados Brasil/Canadá (Argumentum Press, 2009). He is currently involved in a book project with Prof. Antonio D. Tillis from Dartmouth College and Prof. Delzi Laranjeira from UNIFEMM (Brazil) on the representation of masculinity and male sexuality in contemporary literature of the Afro-Americas.

Ann duCille is Professor of English and African American Studies at Wesleyan University.  A former Guggenheim Fellow, she is the author of The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition (1993) and Skin Trade (1996), which won the Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in 1997.  Her current research and writing focus on the black middle class and on representations of race and gender in popular culture.

Harry Elam is the Olive H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities, the Robert and Ruth Halperin University Fellow for Undergraduate Education, Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts, as well as the Senior Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is author of Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka; n the Drama of August Wilson and the Erroll Hill Prize winning The Past as Present i ; and co editor of four books, African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader; Colored Contradictions: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Drama; The Fire This Time: African American Plays for the New Millenium; and Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Performance and Popular Culture. His articles have appeared in American Theater, American Drama, Modern Drama, Theatre Journal, Text and Performance Quarterly as well as journals in Belgium, Israel, Poland and Taiwan, He has also written essays published in several critical anthologies. Professor Elam is the outgoing editor of Theatre Journal and on the editorial boards of Atlantic Studies, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, and Modern Drama. In 2006, Professor Elam was the winner of the Betty Jean Jones award for Outstanding Teaching from the American Theatre and Drama Society, the winner of the Excellence in Editing Award from the Association of Theatre in Higher Education and the winner of the Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Society of Theatre Research. He was also inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Theatre in April 2006.

J. Martin Favor is Associate Professor of English and African and African American Studies Chair, Department of African and African American Studies at Dartmouth. His primary interests are in 20th century African American and American Fiction, cultural studies and theorizing identity. He is  currently working on two projects: a travel narrative about sites associated with the trans-Atlantic slave trade and how they have become tourist attractions; and a project on African American post-modernisms.

Nicole Fleetwood is Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies at Rutgers University. She researches and teaches in the areas of visual culture, technology studies, gender theory, and race and representation. Her articles appear in American Quarterly, Signs, Social Text, tdr: the journal of performance studies, and edited anthologies. Her forthcoming book Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness will be published by the University of Chicago Press in fall 2010. She has worked as a consultant and has collaborated with a number of arts organizations and programs, including the New Museum of Contemporary Art’s Visual Knowledge Program, the Walker Art Center, Southern Exposure, Intersection for the Arts, and Youth Speaks. She is also a video producer and has worked on a number of documentaries.

E. Patrick Johnson is Professor and Chair in the Department of Performance Studies and Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University.  A scholar/artist, Johnson has performed nationally and internationally and has published widely in the area of race, gender, sexuality and performance.  He is the author of Appropriating Blackness:  Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Duke University Press, 2003,) which won several awards, including the Lilla A. Heston Award, the Errol Hill Book Award, and was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.  He is also co-editor (with Mae G. Henderson) of Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology (Duke University Press, 2005).  His most recent book is Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History,(University of North Carolina Press).

Tavia Nyong'o teaches in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. The author of The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minnesota, 2009), Nyong'o has also written for The Nation, Social Text, Radical History Review, and Women & Performance. He is the web editor for Social Text.

Robert J. Patterson, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of English at Florida State University, where he specializes in African American literary and cultural studies. He currently is completing his first book project, Literary Activism: Civil Rights Discourses in Contemporary African American Literature and Culture, which analyzes the ways in which 5 contemporary African American writers' fictive texts have shaped the discourses on civil rights in the post-Civil Rights era. Investigating this overlap between literature, theology, and politics, Literary Activism re-thinks about the types of rights that are-and should be-included in the term "civil rights," while providing a cultural critique of the gender and sexual ideologies that undermine these political enfranchisement efforts. As he finishes this book, he is beginning a second project, tentatively titled, Why I Did (Not) Get Married: The Representational Politics of Marriage, Gender, and Sexuality in Contemporary African American Literature and Culture. This book is an interdisciplinary study that analyzes how and why the institution of marriage has been represented in particular ways and what the implications of those representations are. He contests the notion that marriage is a cure-all for African Americans' political and social problems, examining the ways in which the 1965 Moynihan Report's claims remain central to marriage discourses, even ones that attempt to challenge Moynihan's assertions. In addition to literary studies, Dr. Patterson's research and teaching interests include African American, American, cultural, and gender studies, as well as liberation and womanist theologies.

Russel Rickford is Assistant Professor History at Dartmouth.   His expertise is Black political culture after World War II; black radicalism and workers’ movements in historical context as a means of democratizing America and of advancing social justice issues in the present. Selected works include From Object to Subject: Jazz Hayden, Souls, 6 (2004) 79-90 and Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English, (2000).

Faith Smith is an Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies and English and American Literature at Brandeis University, with appointments in Women’s and Gender Studies and Latin American and Latino Studies. She is currently editing a multi-disciplinary collection of essays, Sex and the Citizen: Interrogating the Caribbean, that examines the intense and often hysterical registers of regional and diasporic discussions currently occurring about sexual identities and practices in the region. She is also working on a study of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century conceptions of modernity and the future entitled  Whose Modern? Caribbean Cultural and Intellectual Formation, 1880-1915. She published John Jacob Thomas and Colonial Formation in the Late Nineteenth-Century Caribbean (University of Virginia Press) in 2002.

 

Maurice Wallace is associate professor of English and African and African American Studies at Duke University. He has also taught at in the departments of English and African and Afro-American Studies at Yale University. He is a former member of the Yale Journal of Criticism editorial collective. Author of Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men's Literature and Culture, 1775-1995, he teaches African American literary and cultural theory, 19th century American literature, gender studies and, more recently, visual culture. He is co-editor with Shawn Michelle Smith of the forthcoming Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity. Wallace's essays have appeared in American Literary History, African American Review, Journal of African American History and several critical anthologies.

Harvey Young is an assistant professor at Northwestern University with appointments in African American Studies, Performance Studies, and Theatre. He is the author of a dozen articles/book chapters on black theatre and performance. His first book, Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body will be published in July (University of Michigan Press, 2010). Currently, he is co-editing Performance in the Borderlands: A Critical Anthology (Palgrave MacMillan, forthcoming 2011) with Ramon Rivera-Servera and drafting an oral history of black theatre in Chicago for Northwestern University press.