Lauréats 2021 du “Space Between Society Essay Prize” (thématique: “Race in the Space Between, 1914-1945”)

Le comité d’attribution du “Space Between Society Essay Prize”, récompensant la meilleure présentation à son congrès annuel, a décidé cette année de décerner son prix à Chris Dingwall, pour son article “On Being Practicable: Vernon Winslow and the Craft of the New Negro Renaissance”. De par la difficulté à départager ces deux articles, l’article de Tess Korobkin, “Making Lynching Modern: Isamu Noguchi’s Death (1934)”, reçoit une mention honorable. Pour rappel, la thématique du congrès de 2021 était: “Race in the Space Between, 1914-1945”.

Présentation des deux articles lauréats par le comité:

“Chris Dingwall’s essay uses craft work to foreground instances of African-American innovation in the interwar period and position Black writers and artists of the New Negro Renaissance and beyond as makers of their own economies and vital contributors to American modernity. It makes significant interventions in African-American studies, modernist studies, and art/craft history as it moves from its point of focus—Vernon Winslow’s 1940 essay on “Making the Negro’s Art Practicable”—into interconnected explorations of economics, education, migration, modernism, and art/craft of the interwar period and today. The essay contributes to an ongoing expansion of scholarly understanding of the New Negro Renaissance beyond its northern iterations, casting New Orleans as a hub of interwar black cultural production, rather than simply a departure point for the Great Migration. Dingwall convincingly makes the case that craft work (he includes both craft practices and writings on craft) “performed a vital service in sustaining and growing African American economies” and in “renovating everyday black culture” by demonstrating how practices sustained by enslaved people could be revitalized as part of a “communal process” to contest the power structures that kept people enslaved into the early twentieth century. Craft was not just practicable but political, Dingwall demonstrates, as he uses Winslow’s work to identify practical means and modalities of black art, autonomy, and excellence.”

“Tess Korobkin’s “Making Lynching Modern: Isamu Noguchi’s Death (1934)” earns an honorable mention by virtue of its compelling and thought-provoking positioning of lynching within the fabric of modernity and modernist art. Resisting narratives—present in the early 20th century and today—that relegate lynching to the periphery of American modernity, Korobkin demonstrates how Noguchi’s use of ultra-modern materials and inter-medial references in his sculpture of a hanged man forced viewers to confront the shared temporality and media ecology of modernist art and white supremacist violence. The committee was impressed with the paper’s interdisciplinary and inter-medial scope, particularly its attention to material culture and the circulation of images of violence and horror.”

Pour en savoir plus sur le travail de Chris Dingwall: https://chrisdingwall.com/

Pour en savoir plus sur le travail de Tess Korobkin: https://arthistory.umd.edu/directory/tess-korobkin

Pour en savoir plus sur The Space Between et ses activités: https://spacebetweensociety.com/

Bonne rentrée à tous et bonnes lectures!

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