Wilson Examines New Negro Renaissance Performances
In 1913, W. E. B. Du Bois’s historical pageant The Star of Ethiopia opened at the Twelfth Regiment Armory with a cast of 350 performers. At the dawn of the New Negro (or Harlem) Renaissance, it celebrated African Americans by tracing their history back to highly developed civilizations in Africa.
According to English PhD student Hayley Wilson, those who launched the New Negro Renaissance had conflicting attitudes toward this African heritage. “Some championed the rich heritage that many enslaved persons brought with them from Africa, and urged for its preservation and even for many African Americans to return to the continent, no matter how far removed from it,” she said. “Others held a different view, preferring to be considered ‘American’ rather than ‘African American.’”
In her dissertation “(re)Imagined Africas: Circum-Atlantic Performance in the Drama of the New Negro Renaissance,” Wilson explores the representation of Africa in the drama and performance arts of this important cultural movement. While scholars and students of literature are familiar with the novels of Zora Neal Hurston and the poetry of Langston Hughes, she points out, less attention has been paid to the plays, musicals, pageants, dance, and other performance forms produced during this period. Because performance is an important way people express who they are and where they came from, these art forms tell us a lot about African American memory, heritage, and identity.
Wilson approaches these texts and performances with a strong sense of their historical, intellectual, and cultural contexts, and she brings an understanding of African philosophy, religion, and performance traditions. Her analysis of Hurston and Hughes’s folk drama Mule Bone, for instance, foregrounds an Africa-centric form of divination, or problem-solving, that is common to the Yoruba culture.
Similarly, her discussion of The Star of Ethiopia sets Du Bois’s pageant in the reconstructed traditions of African masquerades that are staged to recognize and venerate ancestors. This work represents an important contribution to our understanding of diasporic African literature.
In the words of Professor Gĩchingiri Ndĩgĩrĩgĩ, who has worked closely with her on this and other projects, “Hayley’s investment in interdisciplinary approaches to cultural, dramatic, and performance texts and her sensitivity to the continuities and discontinuities between Africa and its diasporas has enabled her to produce refreshingly nuanced scholarship.”
In 2024 Wilson delivered a paper on Hurston, Pan-Africanism, and Yoruba cosmology at the African Literature Association.
In addition to her work on the New Negro Renaissance, Wilson has explored other topics in African diasporic literatures and the performance of race. Her article on British playwright Lucy Prebble’s 2012 play The Effect, which was recently revived in London and New York with Black actors in the main roles, will appear in the journal Modern Drama this year. Because Prebble’s play centers on a drug trial for an antidepressant medication, Wilson argues, the casting change called attention to the history of racial inequities in health care. Like all of Wilson’s work, this essay offers powerful and original insights on race and its transatlantic histories.