Gloria Naylor and Her Archives, Modern and Medieval

DATE/TIME: Friday, January 31, 2020, 10:00am - 03:00pm

LOCATION: Academic Building West, Room 6051, 15 Seminary Place, New Brunswick

This one-day conference takes the occasion of digitizing Gloria Naylor’s archives at Lehigh University to examine some of the questions this resource and this unique project raises: Naylor’s significance and her contribution to the African American tradition; African American tradition and the problem of the archive; and Naylor’s striking and abiding interest in the Middle Ages.

Program

10:00 Introduction.

10:15 Suzanne Edwards, “Medieval Myth-Making in Gloria Naylor’s Sapphira Wade.”
Chair: Stacy Klein.

11:15 Break.

11:30 Shaundra Myers, “Black Women’s Identity Travels.”
Chair: Larry Scanlon.

12:30 Lunch.

1:30 Erica Edwards, “Paranoid Black Femininity and the Postwar Writerscape: On Naylor’s 1996.”
Larry Scanlon, “Bailey’s Café and the Matter of the Name.”
Chair: Sarah Novacich

2:30 Response: Mary Alcaro, Danielle Allor, Ariel Martino, Amadi Ozier
Chair: Larry Scanlon

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