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Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
For submission guidelines, click here
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Veselits, Karen Rose. "Prologue to a Life: Dorothy West's Harlem Renaissance Years, 1926-1934," College of William and Mary, December 2001.
A bio-critical study of writer Dorothy West (1907-1998) that focuses on West’s apprenticeship in Harlem from 1926-1934 during the New Negro literary renaissance and explores how West’s family’s negative construction of color played out its dynamics in her literary imagination. West’s portraits of interracial color consciousness ran counter to the hopes of the Harlem Renaissance to build racial pride through positive self-representation and challenged the racially-based aesthetics of the black periodicals of the 1920s. The dysfunctional model of black family life in West’s literary output demonstrates how W.E.B. Du Bois, especially, underestimated the place of color in shaping positive racial subjectivity. The study further establishes the connection between these early short stories and West’s later novels and helps illuminate The Living is Easy (1948) and The Wedding (1995). West’s literary questioning cost her the support of the black press, thereby limiting her publishing opportunities. This set of circumstances encouraged West and fellow-writer Wallace Thurman to develop independent little magazines as alternative publishing venues to maintain authorship and representational authority, but West’s limited success in the little magazines-her own and others-weakened her as an artist and ultimately compromised the full development of her talent.
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