Du Bois Fellow Lecture: Daniel Abdalla
Du Bois Fellow Lecture: Daniel Abdalla
"A Strange and Secret Thing’: W. E. B. Du Bois and Staging Heredity in the Harlem Renaissance"
W. E. B. Du Bois is well known for his pioneering work on race in the first half of the twentieth century across a variety of genres and disciplines, but his original dramatic works—which number nearly 2,000 pages—remain almost completely critically neglected. This paper draws on my time as W.E.B. Du Bois Center Fellow (summer 2024) in order to recover Du Bois’s theatrical writings in the context of European modernist drama. This is done in three interlinked ways: by highlighting the historical links between the playwrights of the Abbey Theatre and Harlem Renaissance; by showing Du Bois’s engagement with evolutionary science on stage through such themes as heredity, embryology, and race; and by close-reading the plays through the lens of ‘anti-theatricality.’ I argue that attending to Du Bois’s drama forges new connections between Du Bois—as well as other critically-neglected playwrights of the Harlem Renaissance such as Willis Richardson and Marita Bonner—and global modern dramatists such as George Bernard Shaw, W.B. Yeats and Samuel Beckett.
Speaker Bio:
Daniel Ibrahim Abdalla is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in English at the University of Liverpool and was a W.E.B. Du Bois Center Fellow in summer 2024. His first monograph, Heredity in Transatlantic Literary Culture, 1880-1930 (forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan) is the origin of today’s talk. Work from the project has been published in Modern Drama, The Shavian, and is forthcoming in The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Theatre. At the moment he is developing a new project on the history of ideas about environment and indigeneity in early-twentieth-century American drama.
- Date:
- Thursday, April 24, 2025
- Time:
- 12:00pm - 1:00pm
- Time Zone:
- Eastern Time - US & Canada (change)
- Audience:
- Alumni Faculty General Public Graduate Students Library Donors Staff Undergraduates
- Categories:
- Lectures W. E. B. Du Bois Center
