Facing Death: The Fear of Death vs. the Death of Fear
Posted on May 3, 2011 | No Comments
Below you will find an audio podcast of “Facing Death: The Fear of Death vs. the Death of Fear,” an online seminar conducted by Abdul JanMohamed on April 30, 2011 at The University of Kansas. The seminar was a part of the 2010 NEH-sponsored summer institute entitled Making the Wright Connection: Reading Native Son, Black Boy and Uncle Tom’s Children. Running time – 1 hour 6 minutes.
The Global Vision of Richard Wright
Posted on April 29, 2011 | No Comments
Below you will find an audio podcast of “The Global Vision of Richard Wright,” an online seminar conducted by Amritjit Singh on April 23, 2011 at The University of Kansas. The seminar was a part of the 2010 NEH-sponsored summer institute entitled Making the Wright Connection: Reading Native Son, Black Boy and Uncle Tom’s Children. Running time – 1 hour.
A Very Average Negro?: Using Richard Wright’s Life to Teach African-American History
Posted on April 22, 2011 | No Comments
Below you will find an audio podcast of “A Very Average Negro?: Using Richard Wright’s Life to Teach African-American History,” an online seminar conducted by Jennifer Wallach on April 16, 2011. The seminar was a part of the 2010 NEH-sponsored summer institute entitled Making the Wright Connection: Reading Native Son, Black Boy and Uncle Tom’s Children. Running time – 55 minutes.
Facing Death: The Fear of Death vs. the Death of Fear
Posted on March 30, 2011 | No Comments
Saturday, April 30, 2011 at 11:00 a.m. CST
Please join us for a FREE Virtual Seminar taught by Abdul JanMohamed, Professor of English at the University of California (Berkeley)
Click here to join the virtual seminar.
Abstract: In my work on Native Son, and on Wright’s work in general, I have focused on the effects of the threat of death (lynching in Jim Crow society) as well as of the ensuing fear of death on the formation of individual psyche and subjectivity. And I have argued that all of Wright’s fiction is a systematic examination of the subject formed by the threat of death; it is an examination of how the threat/fear of death permeates every nook and cranny of the individual psyche. The virtual seminar, focusing in particular on Book Three of Native Son, will examine how Bigger Thomas faces his fear of death and finally overcomes it. Traditional literary criticism sees Book Three as the weakest part of Native Son; I will argue that it is the strongest and most powerful. My approach to this book and Wright’s work in general is based on the notion that the slave’s fear of death plays a crucial role in his/her enslavement and that conversely the overcoming of that fear can open the road to freedom.
The Global Vision of Richard Wright
Posted on March 27, 2011 | No Comments
Saturday, April 23 at 10:00 a.m. CST
Please join us for a Virtual Seminar led by Amritjit Singh, Langston Hughes Professor of English at Ohio University
Abstract: Our conversation would include among other things the following possible topics: (a) the speaker’s own engagement with Wright’s writings since the 1970s; (b) Wright’s non-fictional writings from the 1950s – such as Pagan Spain, White Man, Listen, Black Power and Color Curtain – and how these relatively neglected works by the novelist anticipate the cross-cultural, postcolonialist, and Black Atlantic perspectives that have emerged since the 1980s; (c) how Wright extends and expands the interrogation of high modernism by Harlem Renaissance writers such as Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Wallace Thurman by injecting issues of social injustice and political freedom to create new iterations of modernism; (d) how Wright may be taught in the classroom in conjunction with other American and ethnic American writers.
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