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SUMMARY:Du Bois Fellow Lecture: Daniel Abdalla
DESCRIPTION:Register here.\n\n"A Strange and Secret Thing’: W. E. B. Du 
 Bois and Staging Heredity in the Harlem Renaissance"\n\nW. 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.\n\nSpeaker Bio:\n\nDaniel 
 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.
ORGANIZER;CN="UMass Amherst Libraries":MAILTO:ref@library.umass.edu
CATEGORIES:Lectures, W. E. B. Du Bois Center
CONTACT;CN="UMass Amherst Libraries":MAILTO:ref@library.umass.edu
STATUS:CONFIRMED
UID:LibCal-14473049
URL:https://libcal.library.umass.edu/event/14473049
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