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A Talk by Cord Whitaker (Wellesley College) on “The Harlem Middle Ages: W.E.B. Du Bois and Global Black Medievalism”

October 27, 2021 @ 5:15 pm - 6:30 pm


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As the first speaker in the Critical Perspectives Lecture Series this fall, the UNC Asheville English Department welcomes guest lecturer Cord Whitaker, associate professor of English at Wellesley College.

Whitaker’s talk will be exploring sociologist and activist W. E. B. Dubois’s interest in the medieval past as offering resources for African Americans’ struggles for equality and justice, in the US and abroad. He will discuss Dubois’s little known fantasy story, The Princess Steel (c. 1908-1910), as a tale that draws on medieval romance traditions in providing a critical lens on early twentieth-century American society, as well as our own still today. This talk comes from Whitaker’s new book project, The Harlem Middle Ages: Color, Time, and Harlem Renaissance Medievalism. Whitaker is also the author of Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

Whitaker teaches courses on a wide variety of medieval subjects such as Chaucer, medieval romance, and the medieval development of race as well as the modern afterlives of these authors, texts, and developments. In this lecture, he tackles concepts surrounding “The Harlem Middle Ages: W.E.B. Du Bois and Global Black Medievalism.

Register for the event through Zoom.

The Critical Perspectives series aims to bring the analytical insights of scholars, theorists, and critics working in literary and cultural studies into our English classrooms and broader academic community at UNC Asheville. A complement to our Visiting Writers series, Critical Perspectives draws no hard line between “creative” and “critical” work but gives focus to speakers who model contemporary modes of analysis in literary fields. Series topics correspond with and enrich current classes offered by English faculty, and collectively range across various approaches and subjects (historical, cultural, theoretical, formal) in contemporary literary studies.

The series concludes on Nov. 16 with a talk by Ari Friedlander (University of Mississippi) on “From Babel to Biopolitics: Class, Sexuality and Race in Early Modern English Rogue Literature.”


Accessibility

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Details

Date:
October 27, 2021
Time:
5:15 pm - 6:30 pm

Organizer

Department of English
Phone:
828.251.6411
Email:
williams@unca.edu