***
The George C. Connor Professorship of American Literature, the SunTrust Chair of Excellence in the Humanities, the Africana Studies Program, and the Departments of English And Modern and Classical Languages and literatures Present
Contra Nationis Natum:
When Black Writers Embrace the Classical Past
Featuring
Dr. Jackie Murray, University of Kentucky
5:30 PM, Wednesday, November 10, 2021
Raccoon Mountain Room, UTC University Center
Masks must be worn inside all UTC facilities
At the dawn of the twentieth century, Thomas Dixon’s “Reconstruction Trilogy” of novels was wildly popular, as were the lynchings and racist terror they incited. Dixon adapted the storyline of the trilogy into a play that D.W. Griffith famously spun into cinematic gold in his epic film Birth of a Nation in 1915. Perhaps as much as any piece of Jim Crow legislation, the works of these two figures helped institutionalize and normalize a White supremacist vision of America. In this lecture, Dr. Jackie Murray looks at the reception of classical antiquity in the literature, theatre, and cinema of W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles Chesnutt, Kelly Miller, and Drusilla Dunjee Houston. In his or her own way, each of these early twentieth-century Black writers used the classical past to undermine the Reconstruction era’s White supremacist collective memory, which Dixon and Griffith helped create.
Jackie Murray is Associate Professor of Classics in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at the University of Kentucky. Her book Neikos and the Poetics of Controversy is under contract with Harvard University Press
Contact Aaron Shaheen at Aaron-Shaheen@utc.edu for more information
