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Screening and Discussion of Documentary “Beyond the Mask: Paul Laurence Dunbar”
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Join the Brown University Library for a screening of the documentary film, Beyond the Mask: Paul Laurence Dunbar, followed by Q&A with filmmaker Frederick Lewis AM ‘83 on Tuesday September 13, 2022 at 4 p.m. in the Lownes Room at the John Hay Library. (Note: This room is at the top of a lengthy stairwell. Please notify us through the RSVP form if you require elevator access or other accommodations.)
Reception with light refreshments at 3:30 p.m. Q&A from 6:15 – 6:45 p.m.
RSVP Required (click to RSVP)
Free and open to the public. Sponsored by the Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity and the John Hay Library in collaboration with the Rhode Island Black Film Festival.
Paul Laurence Dunbar: Beyond the Mask
Paul Laurence Dunbar Paul Laurence Dunbar: Beyond the Mask is a feature length documentary about the life and legacy of Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872 – 1906), the first African American poet and writer to gain international fame. Born to enslaved people in Dayton, OH, Dunbar is best remembered for his poem, “We Wear the Mask,” and for the line, “I know why the caged bird sings!” from his poem, “Sympathy,” which became the title of Maya Angelou’s famous autobiography.
More than ten years in the making, Beyond the Mask received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities with additional support from Ohio Humanities.
Frederick Lewis
Writer and director Frederick Lewis AM ‘83 is a professor in the School of Media Arts & Studies at Ohio University. His independent documentaries have been seen on PBS stations throughout the U.S. and have been screened at more than 100 cultural and educational venues, including the Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art, and the Explorers Club in New York City.
Frederick Lewis AM ’83 Professor Lewis is a recipient of the Presidential Teacher Award, Ohio University’s highest honor for transformative teaching, curriculum innovation and mentoring. He has been a Fulbright Specialist in Hungary and has also taught or lectured in England, Germany, France, Ukraine, Malaysia and Vietnam. He received a master’s degree in Literary Arts from Brown University.
Dunbar and John Hay
In addition to being a statesman, John Hay (1838 – 1905), namesake of the John Hay Library, was himself a writer of dialect poetry as a young man and supported the artistic efforts of Dunbar and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.
Rhode Island Black Film Festival
Established in 2017, the Rhode Island Black Film Festival is an independent film festival that focuses primarily on black film—works by Black members of the film industry. The Film Festival provides a platform for social justice issues and the cultural achievements of African-Americans and persons of African descent. It is held to recognize achievements of film actors of African descent and to honor films that stand out in their portrayal of Black experience. Beyond the Mask:Paul Laurence Dunbar was among 2017 Film Festival selections of the Rhode Island Black FIlm Festival. For additional information about the Film Festival email ann@ribff.org or call 401-996-1166.
Accessibility
To request accommodations for a disability-related need, please reach out to Lizette_Martinez@brown.edu as far in advance of the event as possible. Thank you.
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“Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden” – Talk by Author Zhuqing Li
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Join the Brown University Library for a talk featuring author Zhuqing Li, Visiting Associate Professor of East Asian Studies and Faculty Curator of East Asian Collections at the Library, as she speaks about her book, Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden: Two Sisters Separated by China’s Civil War. The talk will take place in the Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab at the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Library on Thursday, September 15, 2022 from 12 – 1 p.m.
Free and open to the public. Q&A and light refreshments. Books will be sold by the Brown Bookstore at the event.
Join via Zoom:
https://brown.zoom.us/j/94989699434
Meeting ID: 949 8969 9434
Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden: Two Sisters Separated by China’s Civil War
Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden: Two Sisters Separated by China’s Civil War (W. W. Norton & Company; June 21, 2022) is the remarkable true story of two sisters, inseparable as children, whose lives are irrevocably disrupted when the “bamboo curtain” drops overnight between Communist mainland China and Nationalist Taiwan. Their decades-long separation and gritty determination to succeed embodies the traumatic split of the nation itself.
Growing up in China during the 1920s and 1930s, sisters Jun and Hong lived with their extended family in an opulent home named the Flower Fragrant Garden, perched atop a hill in Fuzhou City, Fujian province. Scions of the legendary Chen family that produced the tutor of the last Chinese emperor, Jun and Hong were well-educated and devoted to each other. In 1949, in the midst of China’s civil war, and on the cusp herself of beginning a much sought-after position teaching history, twenty-six-year-old Jun left for a short vacation, visiting a friend on the island of Jinmen, just a mile offshore from the mainland city of Xiamen. Little did Jun know at the time that she would not set foot again on mainland China for another thirty years.
Soon after Jun’s arrival on Jinmen in the summer of 1949, the island would become a major battle ground between the Communists, on the verge of taking control of all of mainland China, and the retreating Nationalists. The Nationalist forces somehow managed to prevail on Jinmen, retaining control of the small island even after their government’s full evacuation of the mainland and retreat to Taiwan. As a result, Jun and Hong, through a twist of fate, ended up totally cut off from each other on opposing sides of the civil war. With her beloved older sister publicly associated with “the wrong side,” Hong finds herself responsible for taking care of her family and must make painful decisions. “[To] sever all contact and connection with Jun would eliminate one of her family’s most incriminating political associations. It was the only way, in Hong’s reasoning, that all of them, perhaps even Jun, would have a chance to survive.”
Zhuqing Li For decades the sisters would have no contact. Hong would become a pioneering doctor and model Communist, surviving two waves of Communist “re-education” and internal exile while Jun was a model capitalist, founding a successful trading company and eventually emigrating to the United States. Author Zhuqing Li chronicles the lives of these two fascinating women, her aunts, with extraordinary empathy and rich detail. Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden is a beautiful book that paints an intimate portrait of life during one of the most complicated and difficult periods in China’s modern history.
Zhuqing Li is a professor of East Asian Studies at Brown University and the author of four scholarly books on Chinese linguistics. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
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Voices of Mass Incarceration in the United States — New John Hay Library Collecting Direction
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Papers of Mumia Abu-Jamal and and Johanna Fernández ‘93 will anchor Voices of Mass Incarceration in the United States, the new collecting direction at the John Hay Library.
More Information / Media
For information in addition to what is below, please see the New York Times article, “Brown University Acquires the Papers of Mumia Abu-Jamal,” by Jenny Schuessler and the News from Brown article, “To advance research on incarceration, Brown acquires personal papers of prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal,” by Jill Kimball.
Voices of Mass Incarceration in the United States
As of 2022, the United States’ vast carceral system imprisons two million people — more than any other nation and with a growth rate of 500% since 1970. Though government and institutional records on incarceration, law, and policy abound, there is a paucity of archival materials by incarcerated individuals, their families, and advocates. There are fewer than twenty archival collections in the U.S. that represent individuals who are incarcerated. Most of these are small (5 folders; a handful of diaries). Until now, none of these have been collected directly from a currently incarcerated individual.
Voices of Mass Incarceration in the United States will provide essential research material to advance scholarship on the carceral state and its historical antecedents.
Accessing the Collections
The Mumia Abu-Jamal and Johanna Fernandez ‘93 collections will be open for research in fall 2023. We are committed to making these materials available to scholars within and beyond Brown, including creating avenues for scholars from Philadelphia and New York to be able to make use of the collections. Digitization of the materials and public events, including a symposium, are on the horizon.
Mumia Abu-Jamal
Referred to by the New York Times as the most recognized death row inmate in the world, Mumia Abu-Jamal is an American political activist and journalist who was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in 1982 for the 1981 killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. He became widely known while on death row for continuously proclaiming his innocence and fighting his conviction and for his writings and commentary on the criminal justice system in the United States, including the 1995 memoir, Live from Death Row. After numerous appeals and public pressure from the “Free Mumia” movement, in 2011 his death penalty sentence was overturned by a federal court and reduced to a sentence of life imprisonment without parole. He entered the prison’s general population early in 2012, and has continued to write about his experiences in and from prison while maintaining his innocence. In 2015, Abu-Jamal published Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal (City Lights, 2015), which was edited by Johanna Fernández.
Composed of approximately 60 boxes of papers that Abu-Jamal sent to Fernández since his imprisonment, and spanning from approximately 1981 – 2019, Abu-Jamal’s archive includes his personal experiences on death row; his ongoing 40+ year imprisonment in solitary confinement, maximum, and medium security Pennsylvania prisons; his reflections on civil rights, incarceration, and freedom; his activist life; and global reaction to his case articulated through activist work on his behalf through publications, film, and other media.
Johanna Fernández ‘93
Born and raised in the Bronx, NY as one of four siblings, Johanna Fernández ‘93 is the daughter of working-class immigrants from the Dominican Republic who fled the Trujillo dictatorship to come to the United States. The first in her family to graduate from college, Fernández received an AB in Literature and American Civilization from Brown in 1993 and later earned a PhD in History from Columbia University. While at Brown, Fernández was a member of Students for Admissions and Minority Aid and led the April 1992 student occupation of University Hall in hopes of pressuring Brown to move more rapidly towards the admission of students regardless of their ability to pay to attend.
Fernández teaches 20th century U.S. history and the history of social movements in the Department of History at Baruch College (CUNY). She is the author of the award-winning book, The Young Lords: A Radical History (UNC Press, February 2020), about the Puerto Rican counterpart to the Black Panther Party. In 2014, she sued the New York City Police Department, claiming that it had failed to produce public records of surveillance of the Young Lords in the 1960s and 1970s; police department employees found those surveillance documents, alongside NYPD dossiers and extensive surveillance of members of the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam, in a Queens warehouse two years later.
A close friend and advocate of Abu-Jamal, Fernández co-edited with Abu-Jamal a special issue of the journal Socialism and Democracy, titled The Roots of Mass Incarceration in the US: Locking Up Black Dissidents and Punishing the Poor (Routledge, 2014). She is the editor of Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal (City Lights, 2015) and is the writer and producer of the film, Justice on Trial: the Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (BigNoise Films, 2010). Fernández is also an active Brown alumna and has served on the Pembroke Center Advisory Council since 2018.
Spanning from approximately 1965-2021, this collection documents Fernández’s personal history, professional work, and activism. Composed of approximately 45+ boxes of documents, oral histories and digital records, this collection is comprehensive in its documentation of Fernández as a Dominican American community activist; her role as chief advocate on behalf of Mumia Abu-Jamal; her research on the history of the Young Lords Party; her legal fight to gain access to NYPD surveillance files; her work in radio and other media; and much more.
You Belong Here
The phrase “You Belong Here” is set above the front desk and in front of the exterior of the John Hay Library. According to Associate University Librarian for Special Collections Amanda Strauss:
I came to Brown to transform the John Hay Library into a boldly inclusive institution that is fully engaged with collections that illuminate the most pressing issues of our time. I am honored that Mumia Abu-Jamal and Johanna Fernandez ‘93 decided to place their collections at the Hay, and we will continue to collect voices of mass incarceration in the United States so that the archival record no longer excludes the voices and stories of individuals and communities affected by the carceral state.”
The John Hay Library is home to Brown University’s remarkable collections of rare books, manuscripts, and University Archives. We are committed to being an active partner in advancing the University’s academic mission. We are here for you.
Media contact: Media_Relations@brown.edu
Collections questions