Description
In this talk, Michael Hall details challenges of memorializing black pleasure through postcards, focusing on visual representations of some of the spaces that defined US leisure, recreation, and hospitality during the early emergence of a leisure industry in the US: Pullman train cars, hotels, rickshaws, steam ship quarters, excursion boats, and pools, beaches, and amusement parks (among other significant and, at times informal, spaces of leisure and recreation). Based on extensive archival research of hundreds of thousands of postcards across a number of physical and digital collections, along with a necessary turn to postcard collecting, this talk critically engages the visual rhetoric of postcards as it counters familiar imagery circulating in mainstream society during Jim Crow (e.g. postcards of lynchings, racial stereotypes, or Black Americans providing service) to visually document and memorialize Black American pleasure. Foregrounding rare postcards depicting Black American pleasure, this talk represents a critical intervention in our visual cultural and cultural historical understanding of black life before the 1960s.
About the Speaker
Michael Ra-shon Hall is Associate Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) and core faculty in VCU's Media, Art, and Text PhD program. His areas of specialization include 20th century and contemporary African American literature and culture, travel and imagination, cultural histories of travel, race and recreation, narrative and visual culture, and speculative fiction. He is also an avid collector of Black Americana postcards and hopes you enjoy the sample of cards he has carefully curated for this talk.
About Colloquium
Colloquium is a weekly series of talks featuring staff, fellows, and scholars who are working with the library’s vast collections. These events bring together experts from various fields to share their research on a wide range of topics, followed by an opportunity for the audience to ask questions and engage in conversation.
Colloquium is open to the public and offers a chance to explore fascinating ideas and new discoveries. No advance registration is required.