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Infants of the Spring Student Matinee Study Guide for Infants of the Spring Student Matinee by Priscilla Page and Shaila Schmidt CONTENTS Playwright’s Bio Novelist’s Bio Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Black Man by Ifa Bayeza The N Word: History, Culture, and Context by Priscilla Page Overview of Harlem Renaissance Overview of The Jazz Age Who’s Who of Harlem Renaissance Race and Racial Violence: • Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffith, 1915 • The Jim Crow Era Racial Violence in the North: How New York City Became The Capital of the Jim Crow North Black Organizing and Resistance: • NAACP • United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) Glossary Ifa Bayeza is an award-winning theater artist and novelist. Her critically acclaimed drama The Ballad of Emmett Till premiered at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago and was awarded a Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference fellowship and the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best Play. The Ballad made its West Coast premiere at the Fountain Theatre in Los Angeles, garnering six Ovation Awards, including Best Production; four Drama Desk Critics' Circle Awards, including Best Production; and the Backstage Garland Award for Best Playwriting. After numerous critically acclaimed regional productions, Bayeza expanded The Ballad into The Till Trilogy, recounting the epic Civil Rights saga in three distinct dramas. In June 2018, Mosaic Theatre in Washington DC will present for the first time all three plays, The Ballad of Emmett Till, benevolence and That Summer in Sumner. Other innovative works for the stage include Ta'zieh – Between Two Rivers; Welcome to Wandaland; String Theory and Homer G & the Rhapsodies in The Fall of Detroit, for which she received a Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays Award. Musicals include Charleston Olio, a Fred Ebb Musical Theatre Award finalist, and Kid Zero with music by Grammy-nominee Harvey Mason. Bayeza is also a novelist, debuting with the "gorgeous" (NY Times), "magical" (Elle), "dazzling" (Essence) Some Sing, Some Cry, co-authored with her sister NtozaKe Shange. A graduate of Harvard University and formerly Distinguished Artist-in-Residence and Sr. Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Africana Studies, Brown University, she was named 2014 Rhode Island State Council on the Arts Playwriting Fellow. Currently, she is pursuing her MFA in Directing and Dramaturgy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she will be directing her adaptation of Wallace Thurman's Harlem Renaissance classic novel Infants of the Spring, premiering at UMass Amherst Rand Theater in March 2018. Wallace Thurman was born in Salt Lake City, Utah on August 16, 1902 to Beulah and Oscar Thurman. He was reared by his maternal grandmother, Emma Jackson, who was among the founders of Calvary Baptist Missionary Church—the first black church in Utah. Young Thurman lived for a time in Boise, Idaho, Chicago, Illinois, and Omaha, Nebraska before returning to Salt Lake City when he was 12. Despite his family’s residence in a state politically and culturally dominated by the Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormon), Thurman was recognized for his brilliance at West High School and the University of Utah, where he was a pre-med major. In 1922, he transferred to the University of Southern California to study journalism but dropped out without receiving a degree. While in Los Angeles he worked at the post office where he met aspiring novelist Arna Bontemps. Thurman and Bontemps worked together on The Pacific Defender, a black newspaper, and they started an artistic journal, Outlet. Relocating to Harlem in 1925, in part as a result of his friendship with Bontemps, Thurman founded a second magazine, The Looking Glass, and became managing editor of The Messenger, the journal of Harlem’s radical Socialists led by Asa Philip Randolph. Thurman also worked as a ghost writer for the magazine, True Story. In 1928 Thurman became the first black reader at Macaulay, a major New York publishing company. Thurman’s writings soon propelled him into the vanguard of the “New Negro Renaissance.” Together with Aaron Douglas, Bruce Nugent, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes, Wallace in 1926 founded his third journal: Fire!! Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists. Langston Hughes, Aaron Douglas, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Gwendolyn B. Bennett were among the first contributors to Fire!! For many critics of the period, Fire!!, not Alain Locke’s edited anthology, The New Negro (1925), launched the Harlem Renaissance. Wallace Thurman published three novels: The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929), which explores intra-racial conflicts related to skin color; Infants of the Spring (1932), which satirizes the Harlem Renaissance and its leading artists; and The Interne (1932), co-authored with A.L. Furman. His play, “Harlem: A Melodrama of Negro Life in Harlem” (written in collaboration with William Jourdan Rapp), reached Broadway in 1929 to mixed reviews. Nonetheless by the early 1930s Wallace Thurman was acknowledged as one of the leading novelists, critics, poets, and playwrights of the Harlem Renaissance although he, in his own works, questioned and debunKed its existence. Wallace Thurman died in New York City on December 22, 1934. By the time of his death at the young age of 32 from tuberculosis, Thurman had established himself as a pioneer and literary revolutionary who left an enviable written record as a legacy. www.blackpast.org/aah/thurman-wallace-1902-1934 PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG BLACK MAN An Historic Work; A Contemporary Drama By Ifa Bayeza Harlem Renaissance novelist Raymond Taylor, after a meteoric debut, struggles to create under the weight of history and the toll of expectation. He staves off anxiety by entertaining his white, downtown colleagues with erudite, witty tours of black Harlem nightlife and mocking caricatures of fellow roomers in the boarding house of eccentrics where he lives, affectionately christened “Niggerati Manor” by his fellow tenant Paul Arbian, the only artist Ray deems worthy of begrudging respect. When Stephen Jorgenson, his Danish visitor, expresses total fascination with the black cultural Mecca, Raymond challenges him to “try living here” and see what it’s really like. No one realizes the revelations that will result. Ray discovers that he has been wrong about everyone, as blind to their true identities as he is to his own. The childlike Pelham gets arrested for rape, Stephen’s fascination gives way to a loathing he can’t explain, Ray’s girlfriend Lucille falls for a roustabout, and the arrogant, self-possessed Paul commits suicide. Only when Raymond’s world collapses does he begin to see, only when he has lost everything does he realize the novel he was seeking to write, only when he has lost everyone, does he comprehend his love for them. The novel ends with an image of dominating white light – a metaphor not only of the white power structure, that is simultaneously invading, controlling, exploiting and disparaging black people and their culture, but of Raymond’s own internalized hatred, as well, the veiled white gaze that all along has existed behind his eyes. From spring to winter, confidence to desolation, joy to despair, community to solitude, innocence to awareness, Infants of the Spring is a story of the fall from an imperfect paradise where life is chaotic, crazy, wild, effulgent and strange to a desolate and lonely place beneath the stark clarity of a winter night. The N-Word: History, Culture and Context By Priscilla Page Excerpt from “History, Amnesia, and the N-Word” by Darryl Lorenzo Wellington It’s easier to debate whether libertinism in language is racist than to address the Big Dilemma: the extent to which racial disparities of the past are culpable for racialized class disparities today and what kinds of correctives may be appropriate. It’s easier to argue language than to argue the world we live in; language, however, always has and always will reflect the world we live in. Our befuddlement over appropriate language mirrors a general befuddlement over the route by which American society has passed from legalized segregation to economic resegregation, without ever having clearly established its ethics vis-à-vis race, class, and economics. Confusion over the N-word pinpoints the importance of preserving and conveying the past in ways that are relevant in the present. (published in Dissent, the Foundation of the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Winter 2008) II From “The Etymology of Nigger: Resistance, Language, and the Politics of Freedom in the Antebellum North” by Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor The best place to begin a conversation about the term nigger is in the late 1820s, a moment when it already reverberated with white belonging and black exile. Yet, to presume the word was always and had only ever been a slur misses the point of its virulence. Instead, it was a word with multiple vantage points, a word whose meanings were complicated by the race and class of the person who spoke it. This is a fact exemplified by a close look at how David Walker used it in his famous 1829 manifesto Appeal . to the Coloured Citizens of the World. Walker, a free man of color who penned his abolitionist pamphlet when he lived in Boston, used his writing as a forum to indict U.S. whites for slavery and their demeaning treatment of free people of color in the North. In the scope of his writing, he invoked the word nigger four times, twice in the body of the work and twice in separate footnotes. Walker’s most familiar description confirms what modern readers already Know. The word, he said, had Latin roots and had once designated ‘‘inanimate beings . such as soot, pot, wood, house, etc,’’ as well as animals.
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