Robert Jefferson Jr.
Robert Jeffereson Jr.
University of Alabama, Birmingham
Robert F. Jefferson Jr. is an Associate Professor of History and African-American Studies in the Department of History at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Jefferson is interested broadly in the 19th and 20th Centuries and national & international movements, including the experiences of disabled veterans, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense and Pan Africanism. He is the author of Fighting for Hope: African American Troops of the 93rd Infantry Division in World War II and Postwar America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) and is currently at work on The Color of Disability: Vasco Hale and Twentieth Century America and American Negritude: Will Mercer Cook, the American Society of African Culture and the Politics of Liberation.
Talk Title: American Negritude: African American Artists and The First World Festival of Negro Arts in the late 1960s
Robert F. Jefferson interrogates the melodic harmonies of Duke Ellington and his band, the penetrating visual exhibitions of Hale Woodruff & Jacob Lawrence and the arresting pan-African writings and speeches of Langston Hughes, Mercer Cook & Leopold Senghor in order to discuss the cultural activity of African-American artists, musicians and writers who participated in the First World Festival of Negro Art held in Dakar, Senegal in 1966. He argues that just as the Pan-African impulses of the Dakar festival became enveloped in riffs of Black Atlantic World resistance and post-World War Two freedom struggle, dissonant notes of ‘Africanity’ emerged from spaces and places that seemed unversed to American observers and spectators alike. He concludes that the vast outpouring of these sentiments resonated throughout the Cold War world and beyond, carrying lasting implications for both the participants and their sponsors as they struggled to come to terms with the meaning of negritude both at home and abroad.
WEB LINK: http://www.uab.edu/cas/history/people/faculty-directory/robert-f-jefferson-jr
