Katherine Fusco

Bio

Katherine Fusco is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her books include Silent Film and U.S. Naturalist Literature: Time, Narrative, and Modernity and Kelly Reichardt (with Nicole Seymour). She is currently completing a project focused on celebrity and identification in the 1920s and 1930s. More information about Katherine's work is at www.katherinefusco.com. 

Contributions

Placing Du Bois’s Ophelia: Multi-Scalar Black Modernity

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To encounter black modernity via W. E. B. Du Bois is to tangle with questions of exemplarity and exceptionality. For my students in a large lecture class on the “American Experience,” many of whom are the first in their family to receive a college degree, many of whom are first- or second-generation immigrants, Booker T. Washington’s message of casting one’s bucket down can resonate more strongly than what they sometimes read as the elitism of Du Bois’s talented tenth. As a member of that tenth, Du Bois does not always speak to them— yeah, well, that guy went to Harvard, but that’s not most people; that’s not me.

Tags:

race pedagogy paratext