Professor George B. Hutchinson | |
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Born | George Bain Hutchinson November 1953 |
Nationality | American |
Known for | The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (1995) |
Title | Newton C. Farr Professor of American Culture |
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Academic background | |
Education | |
Thesis | American Shaman: Visionary Ecstasy and Poetic Function in Whitman’s Verse (1983) |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Americanist |
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George B. Hutchinson is an American scholar,Professor of Literatures in English and Newton C. Farr Professor of American Culture at Cornell University,where he is also Director of the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines. He is well known for his transformative work on 19th- and 20th-century American and African American literature and culture,focusing especially on the racial mores,materialistic addictions,and ecological errors of the United States. A recipient of both the NEH and Guggenheim Fellowships,he is the author of several foundational books.
Hutchinson was raised in Indianapolis. As a child,he loved writing fiction,beginning in about fourth grade. [1] By high school he began to enjoy writing research papers for school,and a fascination for research as well as writing has remained throughout his life. The creative,self-expressive aspect of writing has always enthralled him. When Hutchinson was young,his mother emphasized to him being ‘modern’and open to the new but retaining a sense of quality and what will last. This emphasis may have contributed to Hutchinson's tendency to write counter to intellectual fads while trying to expand his readers' understanding of the possible in the past and present. Hutchinson was also influenced as a child by his maternal grandfather,a geologist who had a reputation for scholarly boldness and integrity. [1]
He graduated from Brown University with an A.B. in American Civilization in 1975. At Brown,he won a silver medal in the Intercollegiate Rowing Association championships in 1973 and served as captain and stroke of the men's varsity crew in 1974–5.
He served in the Peace Corps in Burkina Faso from 1975-7,organizing well-digging projects by hand,for water,in rural villages. Within three months,he abandoned his preconceived notions,attending instead to the work at hand and the people with whom he lived. [2] While in Burkina Fasso,he read Julius Nyerere's Ujamaa:Essays on Socialism. [2] These essays had a lasting influence on Hutchinson's view of property rights and their relation to individual rights more generally,not to mention capitalist democracy itself. Hutchinson's experience as a well digger in Africa completely transformed his understanding of American culture and race, [1] and since then he has never quite accommodated himself to American culture,particularly its wastefulness,its worship of money at the expense of the commonwealth,its dearth of community life,and its racial etiquette. [2]
After graduating from Indiana University Bloomington with a Ph.D. in English and American Studies in 1983,Hutchinson taught at the University of Tennessee from 1982-2000,chairing the American Studies Program from 1987-2000 and holding the Kenneth Curry Chair in English from 1999-2000. During this time,he was President of the Knoxville Rowing Association and played a vital role in establishing the university's first-ever varsity women's crew. In 1986,his first book,The Ecstatic Whitman, was published by the Ohio State Press. In 1993-4 and 1998,Hutchinson was Visiting Professor of North American Studies at the University of Bonn.
Hutchinson's second book,The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, was published by Harvard University Press in 1995. Hutchinson was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in History in 2006 for this book,which was also a finalist for the Rea Non-Fiction Prize of the Boston Book Review in 1996. Following a lecture given by Hutchinson at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research in 2021,more than twenty-five years after The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White was initially published,the Afro-American scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. notably acknowledged the status of Hutchinson's book as "the bible on the Harlem Renaissance". [3]
From 2000 to 2012,Hutchinson was the Booth Tarkington Professor of Literary Studies at Indiana University Bloomington,where he chaired the English department [4] [5] . [6] In 2006,Harvard University Press published Hutchinson's third book,In Search of Nella Larsen, the definitive biography of Larsen.
Since 2013,Hutchinson has researched and taught nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature and culture at Cornell University,focusing particularly on critical questions around race and ecology. [7] His book Facing the Abyss:American Literature and Culture in the 1940s —a work of cultural criticism and history that brings together a wide range of literature,art,philosophy and music alongside discourses on civil rights,ethnicity,gender,labor,politics and ecology—was published by Columbia University Press in 2018.
Hutchinson held a fellowship from Cornell's Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future from 2016 to 2021. He is currently working on ecologies of literary emergence in American literature,a well-digger's memoir set in the village of Zéguedéguin,Burkina Faso,and a biography of Jean Toomer.
Hutchinson was 1988 and 1989 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow. He was also a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow. [8] [9] His book In Search of Nella Larsen, a groundbreaking biography of the author long referred to by scholars as "the mystery woman of the Harlem Renaissance," [10] won the Christian Gauss Award of Phi Beta Kappa and was listed by The Washington Post and Booklist as one of the best Nonfiction books of 2006. It was also selected as an Editors' Choice by the New York Times Book Review and as an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice magazine. [11] His book Facing the Abyss:American Literature and Culture in the 1940s was shortlisted for the Christian Gauss Award in 2019 and won Honorable Mention for the Matei Călinescu Prize of the Modern Language Association,for distinguished scholarship on 20th and 21st century literature and thought. His edition of Jean Toomer's Cane (novel) ,published by Penguin Classics in 2019,was an Editors' Choice of the New York Times Book Review . [12] [13]
Nellallitea "Nella" Larsen was an American novelist. Working as a nurse and a librarian, she published two novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), and a few short stories. Though her literary output was scant, she earned recognition by her contemporaries.
Countee Cullen was an American poet, novelist, children's writer, and playwright, particularly well known during the Harlem Renaissance.
Jessie Redmon Fauset was an editor, poet, essayist, novelist, and educator. Her literary work helped sculpt African-American literature in the 1920s as she focused on portraying a true image of African-American life and history. Her black fictional characters were working professionals which was an inconceivable concept to American society during this time. Her story lines related to themes of racial discrimination, "passing", and feminism.
Carl Van Vechten was an American writer and artistic photographer who was a patron of the Harlem Renaissance and the literary executor of Gertrude Stein. He gained fame as a writer, and notoriety as well, for his 1926 novel Nigger Heaven. In his later years, he took up photography and took many portraits of notable people. Although he was married to women for most of his adult years, Van Vechten engaged in numerous homosexual affairs over his lifetime.
Nigger Heaven is a novel written by Carl Van Vechten, and published in October 1926. The book is set during the Harlem Renaissance in the United States in the 1920s. The book and its title have been controversial since its publication.
Niggerati was the name used, with deliberate irony, by Wallace Thurman for the group of young African-American artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. "Niggerati" is a portmanteau of "nigger" and "literati". The rooming house where he lived, and where that group often met, was similarly christened Niggerati Manor. The group included Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and several of the people behind Thurman's journal FIRE!!, such as Richard Bruce Nugent, Jonathan Davis, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Aaron Douglas.
Jean Toomer was an American poet and novelist commonly associated with the Harlem Renaissance, though he actively resisted the association, and with modernism. His reputation stems from his novel Cane (1923), which Toomer wrote during and after a stint as a school principal at a black school in rural Sparta, Georgia. The novel intertwines the stories of six women and includes an apparently autobiographical thread; sociologist Charles S. Johnson called it "the most astonishingly brilliant beginning of any Negro writer of his generation". He resisted being classified as a "Negro" writer, as he identified as "American". For more than a decade Toomer was an influential follower and representative of the pioneering spiritual teacher G.I. Gurdjieff. Later in life he took up Quakerism.
The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925) is an anthology of fiction, poetry, and essays on African and African-American art and literature edited by Alain Locke, who lived in Washington, DC, and taught at Howard University during the Harlem Renaissance. As a collection of the creative efforts coming out of the burgeoning New Negro Movement or Harlem Renaissance, the book is considered by literary scholars and critics to be the definitive text of the movement. Part 1 of The New Negro: An Interpretation, titled "The Negro Renaissance", includes Locke's title essay "The New Negro", as well as nonfiction essays, poetry, and fiction by writers including Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Eric Walrond.
"New Negro" is a term popularized during the Harlem Renaissance implying a more outspoken advocacy of dignity and a refusal to submit quietly to the practices and laws of Jim Crow racial segregation. The term "New Negro" was made popular by Alain LeRoy Locke in his anthology The New Negro.
Passing (1929) is a novel by American author Nella Larsen. Set primarily in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in the 1920s, the story centers on the reunion of two childhood friends—Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield—and their increasing fascination with each other's lives. The title refers to the practice of "racial passing", which is a key element of the novel. Clare Kendry's attempt to pass as white for her husband, John (Jack) Bellew, is significant and is a catalyst for the tragic events.
The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural revival of African-American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics and scholarship centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, spanning the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after The New Negro, a 1925 anthology edited by Alain Locke. The movement also included the new African-American cultural expressions across the urban areas in the Northeast and Midwest United States affected by a renewed militancy in the general struggle for civil rights, combined with the Great Migration of African-American workers fleeing the racist conditions of the Jim Crow Deep South, as Harlem was the final destination of the largest number of those who migrated north.
Cane is a 1923 novel by noted Harlem Renaissance author Jean Toomer. The novel is structured as a series of vignettes revolving around the origins and experiences of African Americans in the United States. The vignettes alternate in structure between narrative prose, poetry, and play-like passages of dialogue. As a result, the novel has been classified as a composite novel or as a short story cycle. Though some characters and situations recur in different vignettes, the vignettes are mostly freestanding, tied to the other vignettes thematically and contextually more than through specific plot details.
The Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance by Sandra L. West and Aberjhani, is a 2003 encyclopedia of the lives, events, and culture of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s to 1940s. An ebook edition was published through Infobase Publishing in 2010.
Tom Clark Conley is an American philologist. He is Lowell Professor in the Departments of Romance Languages and Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University where he studies relations of space and writing in literature, cartography, and cinema. He and his wife Verena are Faculty Deans of Kirkland House.
The Brownies' Book was the first magazine published for African-American children and youth. Its creation was mentioned in the yearly children's issue of The Crisis in October 1919. The first issue was published during the Harlem Renaissance in January 1920, with issues published monthly until December 1921. It is cited as an "important moment in literary history" for establishing black children's literature in the United States.
Ernestine Rose was a librarian at the New York Public Library responsible for the purchase and incorporation of the Arthur A. Schomburg collection.
Charles Raymond Larson was an American scholar of literature, particularly of African literature. He published a number of anthologies of African literature, as well as literary criticism, and is seen as one of the founders of the study of African literature in the United States.
The Lincoln School for Nurses, also known as Lincoln Hospital and Nursing Home School for Nurses, and Lincoln Hospital School of Nursing, was the first nursing school for African-American women in New York City. It existed from 1898 to 1961. It was founded by Lincoln Hospital in Manhattan. The hospital and nursing school, moved to 141st Street, between Concord Avenue and Southern Boulevard in Mott Haven, the South Bronx, after 1899.
Thadious M. Davis is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is best known for her work on African American and Southern literature.
Ottie Beatrice Graham Jefferson was an American writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance cultural movement.