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Albert Murray—an American Original: Novelist, Essayist, Thinker. A One-day Symposium And Jazz Performance At Columbia University at Buell Hall, Columbia University Morningside Campus
Courtesy of Claire Ittner | Posted on January 13, 2016
Where
Buell Hall, Columbia University Morningside Campus
515 West 116th Street
New York, NY
Map
When
Sat, February 13, 2016
9:00 am
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Musicians
Michael Carvin
percussionAbout
In honor of the Albert Murray Centennial, this symposium will elaborate the Alabama-born Harlemite’s distinctive contribution to American thought and letters. From vernacular to fine art, downhome particulars to cosmopolitan and universal implications, Murray swings aesthetic statement in omni-American hues, and confronts entropy with excellence and epic affirmation despite the blues of the human condition. Murray’s blues idiom hero stomps the blues through elegance and eloquence, extending communal and national ideals. The topics for the symposium include: the influences on Murray’s work; his sui generis literary mastery; how and why he counter-stated “the folklore of white supremacy and the fakelore of black pathology”; and the profound cultural and philosophical reverberations of Murray's oeuvre. University of Pennsylvania professor Herman Beavers will deliver the Keynote Speech, and will be joined by other eminent writers and scholars who investigate Murray’s work with the multi-disciplinary depth it warrants. Jazz was central to Murray’s aesthetic, so the evening jazz performance by the Michael Carvin Experience will round out this celebration of the mind and style of this all-purpose, all-American 20th century intellectual. ...