The Department of Literatures in English presents The Wendy Rosenthal Gellman Lecture on Modern Literature featuring Brent Hayes Edwards.
"Clipping in & Out of the Trenches: Black Radicalism and the Archive"
Thursday, March 17, 2022 5:00 p.m.
Kaufmann Auditorium, G64 Goldwin Smith Hall
DOORS OPEN at 4:30 p.m. ET
Livestream available (details below)
As early as 1911, the brilliant Black editor, street orator, and activist Hubert Harrison complained that "the Negro is being ‘done’ by headlines and other newspaper devices.” Part of a broader project on archival practice as a form of political radicalism, this lecture considers the innovative newspaper clipping and scrapbooking practices of interwar Black intellectuals including Harrison and Claude McKay as an important mode of critique aimed at the pervasive racial prejudice of the mainstream Western press -- a high-stakes attempt to "plead in the courts of the oppressor against oppression," as Harrison put it.
Brent Hayes Edwards is the Peng Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the editor of the journal PMLA, and the author of books including The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism and Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination. His translations include Michel Leiris’s 1934 monumental classic, Phantom Africa. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, Edwards was elected in 2020 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The Gellman Lecture, featuring a distinguished scholar of modern literature, was established by a generous gift from Wendy Rosenthal Gellman ‘81, who majored in English at Cornell.
Attendance Requirements
In-person attendance is open to the Cornell community (with Cornell ID).
Livestream is open to all via Zoom:
https://cornell.zoom.us/j/94246852749?pwd=Tk9tbmVQaXFLMHBCblZkb2pCUUxrdz09
Passcode: 067118
The venue is wheelchair accessible and equipped with assistive listening technology. If you need additional accommodations to participate in this event, please contact us as soon as possible.
For more information, please visit english.cornell.edu/english-events, email creativewriting@cornell.edu, or call 607.255.6800.
