Maya Angelou Archives - Public Seminar

Literature

James Baldwin and the Fire This Time

Good trouble and the courage to hope

September 9, 2020 • by Justin A. Joyce and Dwight A. McBride

History, despite its wrenching pain, Cannot be unlived, but if faced With courage, need not be lived again. Maya Angelou, “On the Pulse of Morning” (1993) As a guide, as a seer, as a prophet – James Baldwin is a writer we need. As Baldwin said about Beauford Delaney, the Black painter who rose to prominence in the ...

Meatpacking Plants and the Defense Production Act

Past Present, Episode 227

May 5, 2020 • by Nicole Hemmer, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and Neil J. Young

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: President Trump has used the Defense Production Act to order meatpacking plants to stay open, even as these factories have become hotspots for coronavirus infection. Niki commented on how Upton Sinclair’s classic novel, The Jungle, exposed the horrible ...

The Outcast State

Shakespeare’s Unlikely Connection to Black Subjectivity

June 18, 2019 • by Seven Richmond

Now that race is the hottest topic of discussion, Othello is everywhere, positioned as the Shakespeare on race. This past semester, while we were reading the play, there were no fewer than four different Othello adaptations nearby: Bill Rauch’s production at the American Reparatory Theater, Mehmet Ali Sanlıkol’s Othello in the Seraglio, Keith Hamilton Cobb’s American Moor, and a ...