The Harlem Renaissance: 'How It Feels to be Colored Me' (June 22)
Description
Explore the cultural contexts and aesthetic debates that animated the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s to 1930s, a time when New Negro identity was being fashioned and performed through fiction, poetry, essays, music, and artwork. Thinking with Zora Neale Hurston (BC ‘28), Langston Hughes, WEB Du Bois, and Alain Locke, we will consider how these artists defined “modern” Blackness in/for a community comprised of differences in gender, class, sexuality, and geographical origin. Questions they and we will consider include the role of Africa and slavery, patronage, primitivism, and popular culture in New Negro expression. (Offered in the morning and afternoon on June 22.)
About the Faculty Lead
Dr. Monica Miller specializes in African-American and American literature and cultural studies. Her research interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-century African-American literature, film, and contemporary art; contemporary literature and cultural studies of the black diaspora; performance studies; and intersectional studies of race, gender, and sexuality. She is currently at work on Blackness, Swedish Style: Figuring Blackness in a Place without Race, which is a multi-genre investigation of multiculturalism, integration, and Afro-Swedishness in relation to Black European Studies and theories of diaspora and diasporic belonging. Documenting and theorizing the emergence of “blackness” in a place that has no obvious or well-developed colonial or imperial history, Blackness Swedish Style thinks differently about “diaspora” and the identities that emerge from it. Investigating connections and disconnections between Europe, Sweden and its African Diaspora, as well as among AfroSwedes themselves, this book is a diverse volume consisting of theory, ethnography, memoir, (oral) history, and contemporary cultural criticism. B.A. Dartmouth College, Ph.D. Harvard University
Registration is Open Now!
Barnard alums (and individuals they invite) and families of current Barnard students can now register for the Spring 2024 Explorers Series — the inaugural Barnard|Next classes. Questions about participation can be addressed to barnardnext@barnard.edu.