MeMoMu_HOHI_022 IN A SPECULATIVE LIGHT: JAMES BALDWIN AND BEAUFORD DELANEY
In a Speculative Light: James Baldwin & Beauford Delaney
Saturday, February 20 – Sunday, February 21, 2020
Presented by the UT Humanities Center
Hosted by the University of Tennessee Humanities Center, and funded in part with a Collaborative Research Grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities, this symposium is an academic event to be held on the UT Knoxville campus and is free to UT faculty, students, and staff. The plenary sessions will be live-streamed at this website to allow for members of the public to attend virtually. The lecture by Fred Moten on Thursday afternoon is free and open to the public.
The symposium will create new knowledge about Black arts history and American late modernism for scholars working in literary studies, musicology, and the visual arts by looking closely, for the first time, at work by two men—writer James Baldwin and painter Beauford Delaney—who were also among the greatest of 20th-century Black American artists. Friends for more than thirty-eight years, they had much in common, for neither man fit easy artistic or identity categories. Both were prolific craftsmen who moved through many artistic genres and modes; both were influenced by jazz and blues, were obsessed with the connotations and properties of color and light, and were gay expatriates from the US alienated by homophobia and racism that permeated society and arts cultures. But while the story of their friendship is well known, and their respective influence among peers was extensive, there has been to date no study clarifying how their relationship shaped their works or influenced 20th-century arts. This project is intended to remedy this significant gap in the critical discourse.
The subject of this project is how Baldwin and Delaney together and separately speculate on the present and bet on the future as artists who embrace their diasporic Black identities. It asks how they create spaces in their lives and in their art works that allow thinking anew about Blackness and the social realities in which they move, and how they wager and gamble on a different future through the very forms of their respective arts.
The symposium will call for scholarly work concerning six categories of research questions: arts history and Black aesthetics, music and sonic arts, ethics and social values, style and form, gender and sexuality, and biography and legacies.
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