Mixed Race Studies

James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex–Colored Man: A Century Later (Session 529)

Modern Language Association
127th MLA Annual Convention
2012-01-05 through 2012-01-05
Washington State Convention Center
Seattle, Washingon

Program arranged by the Division on Late-Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century American Literature

Presiding

Gene Andrew Jarrett, Associate Professor of English
Boston University

Speakers

1. “Music, Race, and Nation in Johnson’s Autobiography”

Erich Nunn, Assistant Professor of English
Auburn University
 
2. “An Old Negro in a New Century: Locating the Southern Slave in Johnson’s Autobiography”

Adena Spingarn
Harvard University
 
3. “The Ex-Colored among Us: Johnson’s Autobiography and the New Millennial Multiracialism”

Michele Elam, Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor of English and Olivier Nomellini Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education
Stanford University

4. “Pragmatic Nationalism in Johnson’s Autobiography”

Michael Clay Hooper, Assistant Professor of English
Prairie View A&M University 

For more information, click here.

Dreams of a Life

The Arts Desk
2011-12-14

Nick Hasted

Carol Morley’s moving documentary brings a dead woman lost in London back to life

The decontamination squad scraped the remains of 38-year-old ex-City professional Joyce Vincent from her seat, in front of a TV which had flickered unseen for three years. They took her wrapped Christmas presents too, and left unsolvable mysteries. How did she die? And how does someone become so alone that they’re left in a north-London flat above a busy shopping centre till their body melts into it?

When director Carol Morley read a Sun headline announcing the macabre discovery in 2006, she pined for those answers, putting ads in the London press, the internet and even a black cab, and working obsessively towards this documentary. It gives feature-length attention to an unknown soldier of 21st-century urban life: a woman who was ignored till she disappeared.

…Death’s tragedy, of course, is often worse for the living. From a primary schoolfriend to work colleagues, Morley’s interviewees show genuine affection, puzzlement and shock as Vincent’s jigsaw is pieced incompletely together. The most heartbreaking figure in her film, though, isn’t Vincent, but Martin, that old boyfriend, who she once asked to marry, and always dropped everything for her. Parental disapproval at her mixed race stymied the wedding but, as he finally breaks down on camera and wails, she was the love of his life. He is bereft for himself that they didn’t stick together, that he didn’t help her even more, that she’s gone…

Read the entire article here.

An art history mystery at Worcester Art Museum

Metrowest Daily News
Framingham, Massachusetts
2011-12-12

Chris Bergeron, Daily News Staff

WORCESTER—Forget the da Vinci Code. There’s no Knight Templars or murderous albinos, but the life and death of Julien Hudson and the whereabouts of his paintings is a fascinating “art historical mystery’’ waiting to be solved.

The second-earliest documented painter of African descent in the U.S. [after Joshua Johnson (see article “The Mysterious Portraitist Joshua Johnson”)], Hudson was making his mark as a portraitist in New Orleans in the early 1800s before dying of unknown causes, leaving behind just six canvases.

Who was the man with searching eyes in one of his remaining paintings? Did he kill himself, as some suspect? With his sixth painting discovered by a New England collector, can more of Hudson’s valuable works be found in area shops, flea markets or your attic?

An intriguing exhibit, “In Search of Julien Hudson,” at the Worcester Art Museum, offers the first retrospective about the man and the artist whose enigmatic career casts light on the lives of free blacks and mixed race people in Louisiana before the Civil War?

Organizer William Keyse Rudolph said, “The search for Julien Hudson isn’t over.”…

…For many New Englanders, “In Search of Julien Hudson’’ will provide an exciting opportunity to learn about a vital subculture of the pre-Civil War South that belies some stereotypes and confirms others.

Rudolph explained that Hudson was the mixed-race grandson of a woman who been freed from slavery and the oldest of four children born from the union of Desiree Marcos and Thomas Hudson, an English merchant and ship’s chandler.

From its founding in 1718 to its sale in 1803 to the U.S. as part of the Louisiana Purchase, New Orleans maintained a class of free people of color who were regarded as a “third caste,’’ with a legal and social status that positioned them between the enslaved and free whites.

Hudson’s life reveals many of the possibilities and limitations experienced by free blacks in New Orleans…

Read the entire article here.

Jean Toomer and Politics (Session 465)

Modern Language Association
127th MLA Annual Convention
2012-01-05 through 2012-01-08
Washington State Convention Center
Seattle, Washington

A Special Session
Saturday, 2012-01-07, 12:00-13:15 PST (Local Time)
Room 6A, WSCC

Presiding:

Gino Pellegrini, Adjunct Assistant Professor of English
Pierce College, Woodland Hills, California

Speakers:

Barbara Clare Foley, Professor of English and American Studies
Rutgers University, Newark

Gino Pellegrini, Adjunct Assistant Professor of English
Pierce College, Woodland Hills, California

Charles Scruggs, Professor of English
University of Arizona

Belinda Wheeler, Assistant Professor of English
Paine  College, Augusta, Georgia

This roundtable will focus on the 2011 edition of Jean Toomer’s Cane, edited by Rudolph Byrd and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and in particular on the editors’ provocative new thesis that Toomer was a Negro who chose to pass for white. Presenters will confront, examine, and discuss Byrd and Gates’s thesis.

For more information, click here.

Machado de Assis, the Brazilian Pyrrhonian

Purdue University Press
1994-06-01
248 pages
6 x 9
Hardback ISBN 10: 1557530513; ISBN 13: 9781557530516
eBook ISBN 10: 1612490948; ISBN 13: 9781612490946

José Raimundo Maia Neto, Professor of the Philosophy
Federal University of Minas Gerais

Machado de Assis, the Brazilian Pyrrhonian examines the towering figure of nineteenth century Latin American letters from a fresh perspective. Machado is a writer of philosophical fiction. His subtle criticism of cherished institutions is evident to all readers, and his skepticism (sometimes confused with pessimism) has often been mentioned by critics. Not until Maia Neto’s study, however, has Machado’s philosophical position been seriously examined by a philosopher.

Maia Neto traces Machado’s particular brand of skepticism to that of the ancient philosopher, Pyrrho of Elis, and reveals the sources through which he inherited that line of thought. The author then shows how Machado’s own philosophic development (as seen primarily through his fiction) follows the stages proposed by Pyrrho for the development of a skeptical world-view: flight from hypocritical society in favor of domestic quietude, investigation of manipulative social interactions, suspension of judgment, and mental tranquility.

Impressive for both the breadth and the depth of its reading, the study pays particular attention to the Brazilian master’s short stories and novels, pointing out how characters during different phases of the author’s career tend to portray the stages in the development of a skeptical philosophy.

For those who study literature, Maia Neto’s book will provide a foundation for understanding the thought of one of the most important writers of the Americas. For philosophers, the book will reveal a fascinating modern world-view, thoroughly rooted in the traditions of ancient skepticism.