We are delighted to invite you to the opening lecture of the 2023/2024 Fall semester of the American Studies Colloquium Series:
Alison Schachter
(Vanderbilt University)
Lorraine Hansberry on Racism, Antisemitism, and Postwar American Intellectual Life
Monday, October 16, 2023
at 4:45 p.m.
You can get 3 OZN points for participating in this event.
Where?
Dobra 55, room 2.118
(the building features some mobility accommodations: ramp and lift)
What?
Sometime in the early 1960s, Lorraine Hansberry drafted an essay on the Eichmann trial, one that she never completed. Writing in the early 1960s, at a moment of anti-communist fervor that silenced both Black and Jewish radical thinkers, Hansberry understood antisemitism and anti-Black racism as an intertwined agenda of white supremacy that defined twentieth-century politics. These concerns also animated her 1964 play, (revived on Broadway this past year), The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, which linked Nazism to American racism and the exploitation of women. The play illuminates how American intellectual life rested not only on acts of racial exclusion, but also on the subordination of women’s intellectual lives to men’s. Through readings of her essays and her play, I examine how Hansberry tackles the vexed legacy Nazism for American intellectual life in the 1960s by articulating a Black left feminist stance that seeks to imagine a place for black and women intellectuals at a moment in which both were stymied.
Who?
Allison Schachter is Professor of English and Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures in the Twentieth Century (Oxford 2013) and Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919-1939 (Northwestern University Press, 2022), which was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award. She is the co-translator, with Jordan Finkin of From the Jewish Provinces, Selected Stories of Fradl Shtok, which was awarded the 2022 MLA Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies. She is currently working on a book about midcentury Jewish and African American women intellectuals.
