Hauptseminar African American Art and the New Deal

During the times of the Great Depression which followed the stock market crash of October 1929 the administration of the President Franklin Delano Roosevelt designed the Works Progress Administration (WPA) as one crucial part of its so-called New Deal. The WPA then started a series of Federal Projects (among them the Federal Theater Project and the Federal Negro Theater Project) which sought to provide work for young unemployed professionals. Employing more than 12000 people at their peak, these Projects provided a sufficiently stable income for actors, writers, designers, musicians, dancers, stagehands and box office staff at a time when jobs were nearly impossible to find. But these Projects achieved far more than to provide employment for the unemployed. As they offered systematic and broad funding for the arts, both American and African American, they signaled that the arts had a crucial role to play in the recovery of the economy. Simultaneously they acknowledged that unemployed and thus discontent artists posed a potential threat to peaceful social and political interactions. In this course we focus on the support of African American Art during the time of the New Deal, placing a special emphasis on (a) the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance during the time of the WPA and (b) theater productions which popularized all black enactments of famous Shakespearean plays. Participants are requested to purchase and read William Shakespeare’s Othello and Macbeth before the beginning of the term. A reader with the relevant material will be made available at the copy shop in Reckhammerweg after the first week of the term. Participants should also be prepared to engage in individual research in the library and on the web. Anglistik Universität Duisburg-Essen SoSe 2013 Bachelor, Bachelor Professorin Buchenau Barbara