"The Trauma of Legitimacy: Black Scholars and Memory in the Age of Black Studies"
A Lecture by Jonathan Holloway, Yale University
Location: East Pyne, 010
Date/Time: 11/13/12 at 4:30 pm - 11/13/12 at 6:00 pm
This event is free and open to the public.
Black scholars’ experiences and the disciplinary development of Black Studies have been negotiated over the very charged questions of what could be known, who could know it, and who is allowed to bear witness. This talk explores these experiences through personal, traumatic memories of Jim Crow, professional memories of denied opportunities, and communal memories of the black experience that manifest themselves into complicated feelings of racial obligation. What has it meant to the individual when the legitimacy of that person and that person’s past is questioned? What does it mean for a discipline when it grows out of traumatic memory?
Jonathan Holloway (Ph.D., Yale University, 1995), is Professor of African American Studies, History and American Studies. He specializes in post-emancipation United States history with a focus on social and intellectual history. He is the author of Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919-1941 (2002), the editor of Ralph Bunche's A Brief and Tentative Analysis of Negro Leadership (2005), and the co-editor of Black Scholars on the Line: Race, Social Science, and American Thought in the 20th Century (2007). His monograph, Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory and Identity in Black America, 1940-2000, is forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press. He is also working on a new edition of W.E.B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk for Yale University Press.
In 2009 Holloway won the William Clyde DeVane Award for Distinguished Scholarship and Teaching in Yale College. Since 2005 he has served as the master of Calhoun College, one of Yale's twelve residential colleges. He is currently Chair of the Council of Masters.
Beyond Yale, Holloway serves on advisory boards for the United Way for Greater New Haven and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park Project. He just completed six years of service on the Advisory Board of the Stanford Humanities Center. He is a frequent contributor to documentary projects, recently serving as a voice over artist (in the role of Richard Wright) for “Soul of a People: Voices from the Federal Writer’s Project. In 2011-2012 he was a visiting fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute at Harvard University as well as an Alphonse Fletcher Sr. Fellow. Currently, he is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.
Category: Event
Department: Center for African American Studies