Harvey Young Workshop
Date and Time
Location
THEATER AND PERFORMANCE
SPEAKER: Harvey Young, Boston University
In this seminar, attendees will discuss a forthcoming academic article by Harvey Young on public whippings in Delaware. Whereas there is an extensive literature on extra-legal corporal punishments (i.e. lynchings), comparatively less attention has been paid to public enactments of corporal punishments of African Americans that were authorized by law in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In focusing on the staging of whippings before assemblies of spectators, this article reveals how a theatre of punishment (by the 20thcentury) normalized societal witnessing of violence against Black men.
About the Speaker
Harvey Young, Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Boston University, is a cultural historian whose research on the performance and experience of race has been widely published in academic journals and profiled in major newspapers and magazines. As a commentator on popular culture, he has appeared on CNN and Good Morning America as well as within the pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Vanity Fair and People among others. He is the author/editor of ten books, including Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory and the Black Body.