Emancipation Day Lecture April 15: Robert S. Levine

Eventbrite RSVP. Please circulate.

Please join the Africana Studies Program for

The George Washington University’s Annual DC Emancipation Day Lecture

“Frederick Douglass’s Tales of Abraham Lincoln”

Robert S. Levine

 Professor of English, The University of Maryland

General Editor, Norton Anthology of American Literature

 

Drawing from his forthcoming book, The Lives of Frederick Douglass (Harvard, 2016), Levine will discuss the image of Lincoln emerging from Douglass’s personal and public writing. Levine will revise the mythical ideas of a Lincoln-Douglass “bromance” and instead shed light on a complex relationship that altered the course of history

A force in American and African American literature, Levine is the author of books such as 1997's Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity and 2008's Dislocating Race and Nation. He has produced scholarly editions from a range of important writers, William Wells Brown and Harriet Beecher Stowe among them. He sits on the editorial boards of American Literary History, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, andJ19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. He has edited numerous critical volumes, including Hemispheric American Studies and The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville. Recent awards include a 2012-13 NEH Senior Fellowship and a 2013-14 Guggenheim Fellowship. Levine was awarded the MLA’s 2013 Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Achievement in American Literary Studies.

April 15, 6:00-7:30 PM

The City View Room

1957 E Street, NW

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

GWU’s Emancipation Day Lecture commemorates April 16^th, 1862, the day Lincoln signed the D.C.’s Compensated Emancipation Act, freeing the District’s enslaved. Co-sponsored with the District of Columbia Archives

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Gayle Wald's New Book: It's Been Beautiful: Soul! and Black Power Television

Professor Wald's latest book is
available from Duke University Press

GW English and American Studies are very excited to announce that Professor Gayle Wald's new book, It’s Been Beautiful: Soul! and Black Power Television (Duke University Press), has just been released. The book examines Soul!, the first African American black variety television show on public television, which between 1968 and 1973 was instrumental in expressing the diversity of black popular culture, thought and politics, as well as helping to create the notion of black community.

Critically-acclaimed poet Nikki Giovanni has this to say about Professor Wald's project:

"The next step should have been, needed to be, had to be a strut. And no one strutted like Ellis Haizlip. We on the radical side of Civil Rights needed someone to listen; those on the more traditional side needed a platform from which to explain their views. Soul! brought it all together. Opera to Rap; Muslim to Christian; men to women; straights to gays. Soul! didn’t back off of any aspect of our community. Brave, Bold and downright Simply Wonderful.  Haizlip led all the shows that followed: Blacks on national television shows doing news; doing entertainment; from Tony Brown’s Journal to Don Cornelius’s signature “Peace, Love and Soul!” Ellis was the leader. Now his story and the story of that great show can be told. Excellent job, Gayle Wald. Ellis would be proud.”

For more information, visit the Duke website for the book here.

And some really great news: to save 30% on the paperback edition of It’s Been Beautiful, call Duke University Press at 888-651-0122 and give them the coupon code E15WALD.

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