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Public Events

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Novel Sounds II: American Fiction in the Age of Rock and Roll

The second installment of the public program Novel Sounds: American Fiction in the Age of Rock and Roll will be held at the Center on Friday, March 3, 2017. In conversations among another remarkable group of musicians, novelists, and scholars, we will explore the surprising reciprocity between the apparently irreverent form of rock and roll and serious literature. Novel Sounds II features panels on rock music’s roots in the ballad tradition as well as the influence of rock culture on contemporary fiction.

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Kim F. Hall, “‘Othello Was My Grandfather’: Race and Shakespeare in the African Diaspora”

This talk explores connections between Shakespeare and freedom dreams in the African Diaspora. It first outlines a tension between the ways that “Shakespeare” and blackness have been valued in the 400 years since Shakespeare’s birth. It then gives examples of the ways that black writers and actors in the early twentieth century used Shakespeare when grappling with constructions of blackness and race in the United States.

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Joan Hinde Stewart, “Joan of Arc: Imagining the Maid”

Mark Twain called Joan of Arc, in complete seriousness, “the most extraordinary person the human race has ever produced.” Joan Hinde Stewart will discuss the historical Joan—her origins, clarity of purpose and gruesome death at the age of nineteen—along with the ways in which she has been imagined across the centuries and the myths that have grown up around her.

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Celeste-Marie Bernier, “‘Lexicon of Liberation’: Imaging Slavery and Imagining Freedom in the African Atlantic Diaspora”

This talk will explore the writings, drawings, paintings, prints, and sculpture produced by African, African American, African Caribbean, and Black British women and men, enslaved and free, living and working across the Black Diaspora over the centuries. Living and dying against a white racist backdrop that sought to destroy Black bodies and souls, they generated alternative art-making traditions and experimental writerly practices that constitute nothing less than “declarations of independence.”

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Marlene L. Daut, “The Haitian Atlantic”

“The Haitian Atlantic” discusses eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Afro-diasporic writing and art about the Haitian Revolution. By exploring a broad range of engagement with the Haitian Revolution from writers living in the Atlantic World, Marlene Daut reveals a traveling language of Haitian revolutionary thought to be central to the development of not only Afro-diasporic anti-slavery activism, but a broader transatlantic abolitionist literary culture that reveals itself to have been shaped in many ways by imagining Haiti.

Novel Sounds

Novel Sounds I: American Fiction in the Age of Rock and Roll

The National Humanities Center announces a new public program entitled Novel Sounds: American Fiction in the Age of Rock and Roll, to be held at the Center October 14–15, 2016. This conference provides a forum for examining rock and roll as a literary form of expression crucially shaping our national heritage. Panelists will explore the surprising reciprocity between the apparently irreverent form of rock and roll and serious literature. Although the birth of rock dates to the mid-1950s, Novel Sounds examines the relationship as it has been developing since the emergence of the ballad form itself.

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William Ferris, “The Storied South: Voices of Writers and Artists”

Over the past fifty years, folklorist William Ferris has documented Southern culture, compiling a remarkable archive of images and stories from the South’s most accomplished writers and artists. In 2013, he shared his collection in the acclaimed book The Storied South: Voices of Writers and Artists and his images have been subsequently featured in an exhibit of the same name, which travels this fall to the NHC. In his talk, Ferris will discuss these distinctive figures whose work has informed American notions of the South and Southerners.

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Nancy F. Cott, “Accidental Internationalists: American Journalists Abroad Between the World Wars”

This lecture will illuminate the field of international possibility seen by a leading fraction of young Americans in the 1920s. It offers a counter-narrative to the well-worn account of American “expatriates” who succumbed to the seductions of Paris and soon returned home chastened. A far larger stratum of would-be writers lived outside the United States without desire to be “expatriates,” found vocations in journalism, brought the world home to American audiences, and allowed these international ventures to shape their lives.

Charles Lindbergh

1927! Kaleidoscope of a Year

From The Jazz Singer to the carving of Mount Rushmore to Charles Lindbergh’s first transatlantic flight: 1927 invites reflection on the intersections and serendipitous synchronicities of one eventful year. Was the world flapping its way into Depression, or did modernist advances still offer hopes for the future? Join NHC Fellows and friends for a multimedia exploration of this rich cultural and artistic landscape. This event will include a variety of short talks on cultural, political, and historical topics as well as selections of music, film, and literature that capture this vibrant moment in the modern era — between the World Wars and before the approaching worldwide depression.