Beauty Instead of Ashes: Launching the Alain Locke Institute by Jeffrey C. Stewart

CLOSING LECTURE

Beauty Instead of Ashes: Launching the Alain Locke Institute

by Jeffrey C. Stewart

Lecture delivered on 12th December 2020

and as part of Nature as Infrastructure - A proposition by The Winter Office. 

How did we get here? How do we get out of here? Who has been here before? In a wide ranging presentation, Stewart will use the Harlem Renaissance - the first modern transnational renaissance - as a transponder to guide us in a discussion about a post-consumer world economy ushered in by COVID 19, our continued obsession with killing one another, and the earth. To ground the above, Stewart will introduce listeners to ideas of Eden, the Garden in America, the 'landless' Garden of Art and Culture and the Black American tradition and the emancipatory design for us all emerging from this tradition. Concluding with some thoughts on Benjamin Banneker and his garden as an infrastructure of the possibilities of a 21st Renaissance for all of us.

Jeffrey C. Stewart is an American Professor of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Much of his career has been spent studying issues of race and culture. He won the 2018 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Biography for his book The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke. His previous books include 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About African American History and Paul Robeson: Artist and Citizen. He has been a Fulbright Professor of American Studies at the University of Rome III, a W.E.B. Du Bois and a Charles Warren Fellow at Harvard University, and Lecturer at the Terra Foundation for American art in Giverny, France.