Victoria Papa

Bio

Victoria Papa is Associate Professor of English and Visual Culture at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. Her research and teaching examine the intersection of creative expression and the survival of structural traumas in 20th- and 21st-century literature and visual culture. Victoria is currently at work on her first book, tentatively titled, Survival Aesthetics: Creative Expression & the Critique of Trauma. Her writing has appeared in publications such as The Brooklyn Rail, Women & Performance, Modernist Cultures, ASAP/J, Public Books, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, and Literature and History. She is co-creator of CARE SYLLABUS – a public humanities project and community education resource featuring original text, visual media, recordings, and live events by activists, artists, and academics.

Contributions

Queer Kinship among the Stars: H.D., Silvia Dobson, and Astrology

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In the introduction to her 500-page unpublished manuscript, A Mirror for a Star, A Star for a Mirror, held in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the writer, teacher, astrologer, farmer, and herbalist Silvia Dobson recounts her first correspondence with H.D. in 1933—a “rapturous” fan letter sent to a poet whom she did not know was “a man or a woman? Alive or dead?”

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queerness astrology

“Clean, Original, Primitive”: Sexual Radicalism, Race Consciousness, and the Case of Harlem’s Queers

Peer Reviewed
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After the publication of the well-known sole issue of the Harlem Renaissance journal, FIRE!! A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists (1926) , W. E. B. Du Bois wrote to the journal’s cofounder Richard Bruce Nugent and asked, “Why don’t you write more about Negroes?” In response, Nugent quipped, “I write about myself, and I’m a Negro, aren’t I?” (Wirth, “FIRE!! In Retrospect,” n. p.) (figs. 1 & 2). Du Bois’s question to the openly queer and artistically experimental Nugent exemplifies 1920s debates about Black American racial representation that occurred between older and younger Black artists, many of them centered in Harlem.

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diagnosis Harlem Renaissance queerness