Second in Series Focuses on Black Literature
NORTH ADAMS – Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts will offer the second in a series of six faculty humanities workshops, "Of Migrations and Renaissances: Harlem, N.Y., and South Side, Chicago, 1915–1975," on Saturday, Jan. 26, from 10 to noon, at Berkshire Community College in Pittsfield."The Flowering of New Literary Talents after World War I and the Continuing Spirit of Cultural Renewal in Subsequent Decades," will be presented by James deJongh, professor of English at the City College and Graduate Center at the City University of New York in New York City.
The session will examine the literary project of the black American generation of the 1920s and early 1930s, and explore dialogic relationships of "New Negro" fiction and poetry to broad modernist concerns of Western culture and to the traditions of American and black literature.
The workshops are free and open to the public, including college, high school, and middle school teachers interested in exploring the relationship between the "Great Migration" of blacks out of the South and creative expression in the large racial enclaves of Harlem and Chicago during the 20th century.
Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and designated as a "We the People" project, workshop topics focus on the history of the Great Migration; jazz, blues, and gospel music; literature and art of the Harlem Renaissance; social realism in the 1930s and 1940s, and the 1960s Black Arts Movement.
In the event of snow, the workshop will be offered on Feb. 2. Subsequent sessions will be "The Harlem Renaissance as a Political and Cultural Movement” (Feb. 23), "Music of the Harlem Renaissance and Beyond” (March 29), "Cultural Renaissance of the South Side of Chicago" (May 31) and "The Black Arts Movement: BAM" (July 26).
The series also is sponsored by the Berkshire Museum, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Northwestern Connecticut Community College, BCC, Upper Housatonic Valley African-American Heritage Trail, Berkshire County regional school districts and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst W.E.B. Dubois Special Collections and University Archives.
The series in funded in part by a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, the second awarded to MCLA in recent years and the second to receive designation as a NEH "We the People" project. In March 2005, NEH awarded MCLA a $100,000 grant to support "The Shaping Role of Place in African American Biography,"
which included black studies curriculum development in local school districts. "We the People” is an initiative that supports the strengthening of the teaching, study, and understanding of American history and culture.
For more information about the workshop, contact Darlene White of BSO
Berkshire Education Programs at dwhite@bso.org or call 413-637-5274.
