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Distinguished Alumni Lecture Series: Professor Trudier Harris

“The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South”
Reception to follow

Wednesday, February 28, 4:30 p.m.
311 Denney Hall
Sponsored by the Center for Folklore Studies

Abstract: African American writers, no matter their place of origin in the United States, inevitably turn to the South for inspiration in their works. From Wallace Thurman (Idaho) to Sherley Anne Williams (California) to James Baldwin (New York), these writers join their southern counterparts in evincing an attraction to as well as a repulsion from the South. Nonetheless, they find it impossible *not* to write about southern territory. The South becomes a rite of passage through fear of violence and violation that marks the only pathway by which writers of African descent in America can authenticate their blackness. The South as the site of imaginative creativity for black writers provides a lens through which to expand conversations about southern literature, southernness, African American identity and creativity, the intersections between African American and European American writers, and literary regionalism.

Trudier Harris (PhD, Ohio State, 1973) is J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of English at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. She is internationally known for distinguished and energetic scholarship in the field of African American literature and folklore studies. Among her eight single-authored books are Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (1984), Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison (1991), and South of Tradition: Essays on African American Literature (2002). She also co-edited The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (1997), Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition (1998), and The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology (1998). Among her numerous awards for scholarship and teaching is the Ohio State College of Humanities' first annual Award of Distinction, presented in 1994.

Students and faculty are invited to join Prof. Harris for coffee and informal chat.


Assistant Professor of English Koritha Mitchell leads a discussion of Chapters 1&6 of Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison and Chapter 1 of Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals. Copies of the readings are available to be photocopied in 421 Denney Hall and on the bulletin board outside 308 Dulles Hall. Please contact Kirsi Haenninen ( haenninen.1@osu.edu) if you have any questions.

The Department of English, 421 Denney Hall, 164 W 17th Ave., Columbus, OH 43210-1340 Phone: (614) 292-6065 Fax: (614) 292-7816

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