Extra Credit

On Friday, around 12pm I attended the African American Expression in Print and Digital Culture Conference. During the conference, they discussed William J. Wilson's "Afric-American Picture Gallery"  and "the Origins of Black Fantasy Fiction." The conference was in a small room, and there were a group of people in the front of the room who were reading off what they analyzed from the texts being discussion. While I thought the analysis of the texts were interesting with intelligent and creative points of view, the conference was a little boring in my opinion. Maybe I attended a section that was a little less interesting, but I found it boring to listen to people read off essays that they wrote about different texts that they read. It would have been nicer to see they actually convey their point to the audience, rather than reading off their own essay.

However, I found a few of their points very interesting. Wilson's picture gallery was depicted as "a dazing collective performance, an assembly of history, and a cultural object that presents history as a collective strategy." The picture gallery was not a singular story, but a gallery of many stories. And the gallery was meant to be interpreted as a collective work. From what I understood, this picture gallery was an Anglo-African magazine that served as an "invaluable resource about scientific interests of black writers and black literature." This relates to our discussion of the "print culture" in lecture because the magazine served as a new form of print that many African American's read. The woman who analyzed this text mentioned something about railroads and how blacks thought of them as "laying iron of [their] own workmanship" and "once cruel bondage." This also speaks to some cruel treatment of blacks that came about during in the late 19th century once railroads were developed.

Here is proof that I attended: