A Lecture by Cheryl Walker, Claremont Colleges

What is a “psychological identity” and why is this term relevant to African American Modernism in the 1920s? Examining works by Jean Toomer, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Richard Bruce Nugent, Walker will argue that the “New Psychology” both animated and in the end depleted the Harlem Renaissance.

For many years the Richard Armour Professor of Modern Languages, Cheryl Walker was also Professor of English and one of the founders of both Women’s Studies and American Studies at the Claremont Colleges. Her books include The Nightingale’s Burden: Women Poets and American Culture Before 1900, Masks Outrageous and Austere: Culture, Psyche and Persona in Modern Women Poets, Indian Nation: Native American Literature and Nineteenth-Century Nationalisms, and God and Elizabeth Bishop: Meditations on Religion and Poetry. Her many years of teaching in interdisciplinary programs are reflected in these works and generated her latest interest in exploring the influence of the New Psychology on African American literature, in a book to be called Black Freud.

Sponsored by the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity and the USC Humanities Associates in the series, Lectures in American Cultures.