Iida Pöllänen presents: "The Black Renaissance and Its Nordic Affiliations"March 9, 2023 at 7–9 p.m.

The first decades of the twentieth century witnessed both extreme Jim Crow segregation in the U.S. and a remarkable global interest in the development of black modernist arts and the Black Renaissance. In this talk, Pöllänen will discuss her ongoing postdoctoral research, where she studies the Black Renaissance by focusing on its relations to the Nordic countries – a geographical area that has thus far been largely neglected in black modernist scholarship. By taking as point of departure the transnational and intertextual connections between African American and Nordic literature from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, her project examines how discussions of race, racism, and the arts traveled and developed through literary texts on both sides of the Atlantic. Pöllänen's project aims to trace the underexplored ways in which Nordic literature affected the development of Black Renaissance arts, and how the products of that Renaissance, conversely, were later appropriated into a largely white political and cultural context in Northern Europe.