Student Research in Beinecke Collections
Rachel Kempf, Yale College Class of 2013
“Lost in the Zoo: The Art of Charles Sebree”
written for Professor Robert Stepto’s English 306 course, “American Artists and the African-American Book”
Using correspondence from the Countee Cullen Collection, this essay examines the life and work of Harlem Renaissance artist Charles Sebree, focusing on his collaboration with Countee Cullen on the children’s book The Lost Zoo. This essay explores Sebree’s work through the lens of his life experience as evidenced by his communication with Alain Locke during his period of collaboration with Cullen. By comparing documents from the Beinecke’s James Weldon Johnson Collection (MSS 7 Box 2) and correspondence from the Alain Locke Collection at Howard University Moorland Springarn Research Center, this essay reexamines existing explanations of Sebree’s behavior during his collaboration with Countee Cullen and calls attention to the artist’s formative friendship with Alain Locke only briefly mentioned in other examinations of Sebree’s work.
Finally, the essay examines how these personal relationships and individual trials may have influenced Sebree’s work on The Lost Zoo and how his experience with the book may or may not have influenced his future career.
Read the article here: Rachel Kempf, “Lost in the Zoo: The Art of Charles Sebree”
Lois Mailou Jones Books
The Beinecke Library has an outstanding collection of books illustrated by African American artist Lois Mailou Jones. The collection includes the many books for which Jones is well known as well as several works for which she is very likely the (uncredited) illustrator. Works about Jones, exhibition catalogs, and ephemeral publications are also present. Titles include: Great American Negroes in Verse, Word Pictures of Great Negroes, Their Eyes Were Watching God (with cover design by LMJ), Reflective Moments, Picture-Poetry Book, Negro Art, Music, and Rhyme, Poems of Leopold Sedar Senghor (with silkscreen prints by LMJ), and many others.
All titles and related materials can be located by searching Orbis, Yale Library’s Catalog for book.
Additional information about Lois Mailou Jones is available from the Loïs Mailou Jones Pierre-Noël Trust.
NAACP Publications and Ephemera
The Beinecke has recently acquired an archive of publications, ephemera, and other materials related to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The forty-two items total nearly 700 pages, spanning more than sixty years, beginning in 1915, with much documentation of the NAACP’s early efforts to end lynching in the United States, including “The Waco Horror” by Elizabeth Freeman, “Brief in Support of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill” by Moorefield Storey, a 1930’s “Stop Lynching NAACP Legal Defense Fund” pin-back button, etc. Also included are two ephemeral items, representing Anti-NAACP racist publications in the United States. The large majority of publications in the collection are unrecorded by OCLC (or otherwise known in only a few institutional holdings). A detailed list of the collection contents is available here (NOTE: this document includes images and language that some my find disturbing): NAACP Collection Description. Related collections include: Walter White and Poppy Cannon Papers (JWJ MSS 38); James Weldon Johnson and Grace Nail Johnson Papers (JWJ MSS 49); Joel Spingarn Collection (JWJ MSS 11); JWJ Clippings Collection (JWJ MSS 89); Leon F. Litwack Collection Protest Literature (WA MSS S-2616); additional materials may be found by searching the Finding Aid Database, Uncataloged Accession Database, Digital Library, and Orbis (links to these and other tools can be found on the Beinecke Library Home Page).
Image: [Pictorial Broadside, urging membership in the NAACP]: STRONG MAN! [Caption title]. Published by the Pittsburgh Courier, Pittsburg, Penn. Hollywood, California: Distributed by Hollywood Beauty Secrets Company, Owned by Mr. & Mrs. Homer Goodwin [No Date, but circa 1950’s?]. Original promotional broadside, issued by a cosmetics company.
New Research: Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance
Carl Van Vechten was a white man with a passion for blackness who played a crucial role in helping the Harlem Renaissance, a black movement, come to understand itself. Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance is grounded in the dramas occasioned by the Harlem Renaissance, as it is called today, or New Negro Renaissance, as it was called in the 1920s, when it first came into being. Emily Bernard focuses on writing—the black and white of things—the articles, fiction, essays, and letters that Carl Van Vechten wrote to black people and about black culture, and the writing of the black people who wrote to and about him. Above all, she is interested in the interpersonal exchanges that inspired the writing, which are ultimately far more significant than the public records would suggest.
This book is a partial biography of a once controversial figure. It is not a comprehensive history of an entire life, but rather a chronicle of one of his lives, his black life, which began in his boyhood and thrived until his death. The narrative at the core of Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance is not an attempt to answer the question of whether Van Vechten was good or bad for black people, or whether or not he hurt or helped black creative expression during the Harlem Renaissance. As Bernard writes, the book instead “enlarges that question into something much richer and more nuanced: a tale about the messy realities of race, and the complicated tangle of black and white.”
Emily Bernard is associate professor, English Department and ALANA U.S. Ethnic Studies Program, University of Vermont. Her books include Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She lives in Burlington, VT. Bernard was the inaugural James Weldon Johnson Memorial Fellow at the Beiencke Library in 2008.
Radio interview with author Emily Bernard: http://www.vpr.net/news_detail/93865/bernards-new-biography-captures-carl-van-vechten/
Thistlewood Archive
T
he Beinecke Library is happy to announce the recent acquisition of the archive of Thomas Thistlewood, eighteenth-century British planter in Jamaica. Spanning more than thirty-five years, from before Thistlewood’s arrival in Jamaica in 1750 through his death in 1786, the archive comprises some 92 volumes of diaries and notebooks.
Thistlewood kept meticulous daily records of his experiences as a planter and slave owner from 1748 – 1786. The 37 volumes of his diaries leave a detailed portrait of the racial, sexual, economic, and other realities of plantation life in eighteenth-century Jamaica. Over 20 volumes of reading notebooks document his participation in the British literary and scientific cultures of the Enlightenment. His series of 34 weather observation notebooks offer an archive of the climate in Jamaica over three decades, and of the enactment of those philosophies of observation, categorization, and measurement which characterize Thistlewood’s notes on plantation management.
The archive has already been the subject of several important recent works by scholars including James Walvin, Trevor Burnard, Douglas Hall, and Michael Chenoweth. The collection adds to the Beinecke’s already extensive manuscript and archival holdings for early modern British history and materials relating to slavery and abolition, and will prove an invaluable resource for scholarship in the Atlantic World, the Caribbean, African Diaspora Studies, cultures of empire, and British and European history.
Once catalogued and housed, the collection will be open for research in the fall. Please don’t hesitate to contact Kathryn James (kathryn.james@yale.edu), the Beinecke’s Curator for Early Modern Books and Manuscripts, with any questions.
Images: Documents form the Thistlewood Archive.
Exhibition Opening: Remembering Shakespeare
Please join us next Wednesday, February 15, at 4:30 pm on the Beinecke Library mezzanine for the opening of the Beinecke’s spring exhibition, “Remembering Shakespeare.”
Remembering Shakespeare
Wednesday, February 1 – Monday, June 4, 2012
Remembering Shakespeare tells the story of how a playwright and poet in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England came to be remembered as the world’s most venerated author. Curated by David Scott Kastan, George M. Bodman Professor of English at Yale, and Kathryn James, Beinecke Library Curator, the exhibition brings together works from the holdings of Yale University’s Elizabethan Club, Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Lewis Walpole Library, Yale Center for British Art, and Beinecke Library, in an unprecedented display of one of North America’s finest collections on Shakespeare. Drawing on these extraordinary resources, Remembering Shakespeare offers a unique visual history of how the “Booke” of Shakespeare was made and read, written and remembered, from his lifetime through the present.
Image: Paul Robeson in the role of Othello, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1944. Photographs by Carl Van Vechten are used with permission of the Van Vechten Trust; permission of the Trust is required to publish Van Vechten photographs in any format. To learn more, contact the Curator, Yale Collection of American Literature.
This exhibition is part of Shakespeare at Yale, a multi-venued celebration for the spring of 2012 that will display the extraordinary resources that exist at the University for the study and enjoyment of Shakespeare. For more information, visit: Shakespeare at Yale.
Colson Whitehead Reading
Colson Whitehead, Reading
Monday, February 6, time 4:30pm
Beinecke Library, 121 Wall Street
Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series
Contact: louise.bernard@yale.edu
Colson Whitehead is the author of the novels The Intuitionist (1999), a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award; John Henry Days (2001), which won the Young Lions Fiction Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Prize, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Apex Hides the Hurt (2006), which won the PEN/Oakland award; Sag Harbor (2009), a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner; and, most recently, Zone One (2011), a zombie novel set in Manhattan. He has also written a book of essays about his hometown, The Colossus of New York (2003), and his reviews, essays, and fiction have appeared in a number of publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper’s, and Grantland.com. A recipient of a Whiting Writers Award and a MacArthur Fellowship, Whitehead lives in Brooklyn, and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton.
VISITING FELLOW TALK
Crossing the Atlantic: More thoughts on the Slave Trade
Monday, January 30, 2012 at 2:30 p.m.
Beinecke Library, Room 39
The Atlantic slave trade continues to intrigue – and confuse. The best part of twelve million Africans were loaded onto the slave ships: eleven million survived to landfall. But many of the older ideas of the precise nature of that trade are now under scrutiny. The violent experience on board the slave ships attracts less attention than it ought. And what persuaded generations of slave traders to inflict such sea borne horrors on so many Africans? More perplexing still, why did the western world turn against the slave trade ( which yielded so much material bounty and prosperity) – and in so short a span of time? In 1700 few questioned the trade: by 1800 it was roundly condemned.
James Walvin is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of York U.K. where he taught for many years. He has published widely on the history of slavery, and on modern British social history. Among his recent books are The Slave Trade, (Thames and Hudson, London, 2011) and The Zong. A Massacre, the Law, and the End of Slavery, (Yale University Press, 2011.) At the Beinecke he plans to continue his work on the slave trade by exploring the manuscript and printed collections relating to the slave trade in the South Atlantic in the nineteenth century.
Introducing Aeon
Introducing AEON: The future is now!
Aeon is an online registration and requesting service designed specifically for special collections and research libraries.
Beginning on Monday, October 3, the Beinecke Library will discontinue use of all paper call slips in favor of Aeon online requesting. Yale faculty, graduate students, undergraduates and staff will be able to access their account using their NetID. Visiting researchers who have registered with us will be assigned a username and password at the desk.
We believe this new system will lead to greater efficiency and a higher level of service. However, as with any new technology, there may be some issues within the first few weeks that could lead to slight delays in your requests. Thank you for your patience.
For AEON info on the Beinecke home page: http://www.library.yale.edu/beinecke/brblinfo/brblvisi.html
For additional information on AEON: http://www.atlas-sys.com/products/aeon/
For questions: Moira.fitzgerald@yale.edu
“This is My Life”
“This Is My Life”: The Sonnet and the Emergence of Black Subjectivity
Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 2:00 pm
Beinecke Library, Room 38
Part of a larger research project on the African American sonnet, this talk will explore the role of the sonnet form in the emergence of an individualized subjectivity in turn-of-the-century black writing. African American poetry in the nineteenth century was overwhelmingly public. Where it did not take a stand in political debates, it at least presented the kind of exteriorized, carefully crafted persona deemed suitable in the struggle for cultural recognition. It was in the sonnet, that poets were first able to move beyond these constraints toward a fuller self-expression. Dunbar, Braithwaite, and a number of their contemporaries took advantage of the emotional depth associated with the sonnet form to articulate a literary subjectivity that was often partial and paradoxical but constituted an important step toward cultural and psychological emancipation.
Timo Müller is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Augsburg, Germany, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 2009. His main research areas are modernism, ecocriticism, and African American and Caribbean literature. He has published The Self as Object in Modernist Fiction: James, Joyce, Hemingway (2010) as well as articles in journals including Anglia, The Journal of Modern Literature, and Twentieth-Century Literature. An article on James Weldon Johnson and the genteel tradition is forthcoming. His research at Beinecke is for his current book project, The African American Sonnet.
Image: Aaron Douglas illustration appearing in Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life, 1926.
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