The Smoke, Lilies & Jade lecture, fora and symposia series was named after Harlem Renaissance writer Richard Bruce Nugent’s short story on gender, race, and sexuality. The Harlem Renaissance movement, often referred to as the New Negro movement in the 1920s and '30s, delved into issues of race, race consciousness, and identity through history, visual culture, literary arts, and philosophical and sociological debates.
Considered a "gay rebel" of that era, Nugent boldly addressed the issue of same-sex relationships--a highly charged issue for that day and even ours. In that vein, Smoke, Lilies & Jade will reflect the diversity, intersection, and complexity of subjects undertaken by scholars, writers, artists, and community activists in the field of African American and Diaspora Studies. This academic endeavor also serves as an outreach and collaborative mechanism to and between Greater Nashville and Vanderbilt.
In October 2008, African American and Diaspora Studies was one of the primary co-sponsors, along with the W. T. Bandy Center for Baudelaire and Modern French Studies and the Department of French and Italian, of the Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium on "Empire, Identity, Exoticism."
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