"Beneath the Harlem Renaissance" - A Proposed MLA Special Session
Critics have cited the publication of Claude McKay's Harlem Shadows (1922) as the inauguration of the Harlem Renaissance. 80 years later, this MLA special session seeks to mark that occasion by re-examining our understandings of this period in African American literary history. In particular, this special session will ask "what lies beneath" the Harlem Renaissance. We will explore 1920s African American literature similar to David Reynolds's investigation of the American Renaissance, asking what discourses, issues, or texts we have neglected in our critical understandings of the period. What are "Harlem's Shadows," to signify on Claude McKay? What haunts the Harlem Renaissance? How might we understand the Harlem Renaissance's reconstructions of modernism? Of 1920s American culture?
Possible topics for consideration:
The "Popular" and the Harlem Renaissance
Gender, sexuality, class, or nationality as key to understanding the period
Harlem as a social space
Revisions of Harlem Renaissance critical narratives
Teaching the Harlem Renaissance
Neglected or rediscovered writers of the Harlem Renaissance
Contemporary discourses in 1920s African American Literatures
The Harlem Renaissance and Aesthetic Modernism
Presentations on a specific author are welcome, as are papers that take a broader view of this cultural period. Essays that take a meta-critical stance on Harlem Renaissance scholarship are also desired.
A 250-word abstract and a one-page CV must be received by March 27, 2002. Email submissions preferred; hard copy submissions accepted at the address below.
David Magill
Department of English
University of Kentucky
1215 Patterson Office Tower
Lexington, KY 40506-0027
demagi0@uky.edu
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