20170109 – History, Psychology, Sociology Speakers Needed on 09/14/2017 for Lawrence, Kansas for 2017 Black Love: A Symposium

09/14/2017 through 09/16/2017
University of Kansas
Lawrence, Kansas
2017 Black Love: A Symposium

Preferred Meeting Topics:
History, Psychology, Sociology

Booking Deadline for Speaker: 01/09/2017

Demographic Mix of the Audience:
50% Male
50% Female

Age Group(s) Expected in Audience:
20-60

Number of Attendees Expected
200+

Special Details About This Meeting/Audience:

On September 18, 1937, Zora Neale Hurston’s seminal novel Their Eyes Were Watching God was published. It initially received tepid praise, at best, along with needlessly harsh criticism from fellow fiction writer Richard Wright for its supposed counterrevolutionary minstrel image. Ushering in a new era of protest literature, Wright objected to Hurston’s publication of a love story at the height of Jim Crow oppression during the Depression. Yet Hurston’s work, with themes of sensuality, self-discovery, spirituality, and voicedness inspired by the writer’s own bittersweet love affair, has endured in African American literary history. Black women writers and scholars, such as Alice Walker and Sherley Anne Williams, began to reclaim Hurston as a pivotal writer in the African American literary tradition in the 1970s. By 1980, Hurston’s significance was all the more enhanced with the publication of Robert E. Hemenway’s Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Today, Their Eyes Were Watching God is a fixture of American arts and letters. It is frequently read in classrooms, engaged in scholarship, and cited as an inspiriting influence for other creative works.

In celebration of the 80th anniversary of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Dr. Ayesha K. Hardison and Dr. Randal Maurice Jelks propose to explore the legacy of Hurston’s novel by examining themes of Black Love in African American art, literature, religious thought, and cultural ways that predate as well as succeed its publication. By love, we mean romance, Eros, and erotic desire between and among black persons. As Janie Crawford explains to her friend Pheoby, “Love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets.” We contend that an exchange about the evolving aesthetics and politics of Black Love is just as important now as it was in 1937 given that its expression is still too often disavowed and pathologized in critical discourses or deemed illegible and unprofitable in popular culture.

Scope of the Overall Organization:
Local, National, International

Name of Meeting Organizer:
None Given

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