Scholar Jasmine Nicole Cobb compares William Townsend's sketches of captive Africans from the schooner Amistad, held at the Beinecke, to later images of African Americans.
The Heritage Theater Ensemble will perform scenes from play featured in the Beinecke Exhibition “Casting Shadows” on Saturday, April 18 at 1 p.m. at Beinecke Library, 121 Wall Street.
Known only as the “Ex-Colored Man,” the protagonist in Johnson’s novel is forced to choose between celebrating his African American heritage or “passing” as an average white man in a post-Reconstruction America that is rapidly changing.
Nathaniel Mackey has been named the winner of Yale’s 2015 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, joining a list of past winners that includes such luminaries as Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, E.E. Cummings, and Marianne Moore.
The collection includes behind-the-scenes photographs and posed photographs depicting actors Eddie Anderson, Lena Horne, and Rex Ingram, as well as other cast members.
Ben Glaser recently published an article in PMLA 129 no. 3 (May 2014), “Folk Iambics: Prosody, Vestiges, and Sterling Brown’s Outline for the Study of the Poetry of American Negroes,” making use of materials in the James Weldon Johnson Collection related to Johnson’s Book of American Negro Poetry.
