Conversation

During the past decade, scholars of literature, film, art history, and American studies have argued persuasively that key features of 20th Century Modernism stem from black/white transracial encounters. Is it time for cultural historians to erase DuBois’s “colorline?” Or do notions of modernist hybridity, collaboration, and “racial masquerade” need to be interrogated in light of stubborn, race-based power differentials? Do cross-race cultural dialogue/transformation/exchange work in the same way and to the same way and the dame degree in different disciplines?

Moderator
Judith Wilson, assistant professor, African-American Studies, UC-Irvine

Participants 
Susan Gubar, professor of English, Indiana University and author of Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture
Jergen Heinrichs, assistant professor of Art History, Seton Hall and author of Blackness in Weimar: 1920s German Art Practice and American Jazz and Dance
Michael North, professor of English, UCLA and author of The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature
Helen Shannon, author of doctoral dissertation of the reception of African art in black and white American early modernist circles
Michele Wallace, assistant professor of English and Women’s Studies at CUNY and author of Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman and Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory.
Lorraine O’Grady, Vera List Center Fellow, coordinator