Black Boys, Dolls, and Textual Histories: Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s “His Heart’s Desire” (1900) (American Antiquarian Society)

More information and registration: Black Boys, Dolls, and Textual Histories: Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s “His Heart’s Desire” (1900).

This virtual forum features Jean Lutes (Villanova University), Denise Burgher (Colored Conventions Project), Trinity Rogers (Villanova University), and Brigitte Fielder (University of Wisconsin-Madison) of Taught by Literature, a collaborative digital humanities project that re-centers Black women writers, beginning with the work of African American author and activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson. The speakers will use Dunbar-Nelson’s short story, “His Heart’s Desire” (1900) to explore the challenges scholars face in recovering little-known African American texts when confronted by multiple textual variants, manuscripts without dates, and a readership unfamiliar with an author’s work.  A remarkable short story about a boy who wants a doll, “His Heart’s Desire” is one of twelve short stories Dunbar-Nelson wrote in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries about children living in a poor urban neighborhood. The stories were inspired by her work teaching Black kindergarteners at the White Rose Mission in New York City.