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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
The Harlem Renaissance's Hidden Figure, Jada A. Grice
The Harlem Renaissance's Hidden Figure, Jada A. Grice
English Summer Fellows
This project will seek to look at the Harlem Renaissance’s hidden figure, Jessie Fauset. Jessie Fauset was born to an A.M.E. minister and his wife as one of ten children in Camden County New Jersey and raised in Philadelphia. From there she got her college degree and began teaching all over the country. She has written four novels, There is Confusion, Plum Bun, The Chinaberry Tree, and Comedy: American Style, all of which I have read this summer. Each novel focuses on the early twentieth century black family. I will be analyzing these novels under the four themes of passing, …
Staging Colorism, Mya D. Flood
Staging Colorism, Mya D. Flood
Theater Summer Fellows
Colorism is a topic not frequently discussed in the African American community. My research focuses on representations of colorism in American drama. Using this research, I am workshopping a creative performance piece about this taboo topic to educate both Ursinus students and community members of all racial backgrounds. The research involves dissecting plays that confront colorism and the everyday struggles dealing with the stereotypes that come along with lighter and darker skin. My research takes the form of an annotated bibliography of plays about colorism and/or racism, a 20 page research paper about colorism in drama, and a draft of …
Jessie Fauset’S Not-So-New Negro Womanhood: The Harlem Renaissance, The Long Nineteenth Century, And Legacies Of Feminine Representation, Meredith Goldsmith
Jessie Fauset’S Not-So-New Negro Womanhood: The Harlem Renaissance, The Long Nineteenth Century, And Legacies Of Feminine Representation, Meredith Goldsmith
English Faculty Publications
Fauset’s texts offer a repository of precisely what critic Alain Locke labeled retrograde: seemingly outdated plotlines and tropes that draw upon multiple literary, historical, and popular cultural sources. This essay aims to change the way we read Fauset by excavating this literary archive and exploring how the literary “past” informs the landscape of Fauset’s fiction. Rather than viewing Fauset’s novels as deviations from or subversive instantiations of modernity, I view them as part of a long nineteenth-century tradition of gendered representation. Instead of claiming a subversiveness that Fauset might have rejected or a conservatism that fails to account for the …