Albert Murray, An American Original: Novelist, Essayist, Thinker
Saturday 13 February, 2016
9am - 9pm, $0
Columbia University, Buell Hall
515 West 116 Street, East Gallery
In honor of the Albert Murray Centennial, this symposium will elaborate the Alabama-born Harlemite's distinctive contribution to American thought and letters. From vernacular to fine art, downhome particulars to cosmopolitan and universal implications, Murray swings aesthetic statement in omni-American hues, and confronts entropy with excellence and epic affirmation despite the blues of the human condition. Murray's blues idiom hero stomps the blues through elegance and eloquence, extending communal and national ideals. The topics for the symposium include: the influences on Murray's work; his sui generis literary mastery; how and why he counter-stated the folklore of white supremacy and the fakelore of black pathology—and the profound cultural and philosophical reverberations of Murray's oeuvre. University of Pennsylvania professor Herman Beavers will deliver the Keynote Speech. An evening performance by the Michael Carvin Experience will round out the day's celebrations.