David Neita will be holding his seminar on the Art of being black at Inspirational YOU on 31st March 2012.
On Monday 20th February 2012, I attended a seminar at the University College of London’s Senate House entitled ‘Invisibility: The Art of Being Black’ which was delivered by David Neita and chaired by Marika Sherwood of the Black and Asian Studies Association.
David’s seminar was hugely popular and quickly reached capacity. Inspirational YOU have invited David to share this great seminar with you again.
The Black Presence in Western Art has been suppressed and David discusses this.
David introduces us to two authors:
1. Ralph Ellison who wrote the Invisible Man in 1952
2. David Dabyden who wrote ‘Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art
‘Invisible Man’ is the story of a young, college-educated black man struggling to survive and succeed in a racially divided society that refuses to see him as a human being. Told in the form of a first-person narrative, Invisible Man traces the nameless narrator’s physical and psychological journey from blind ignorance to enlightened awareness — or, according to the author, “from Purpose to Passion to Perception” — through a series of flashbacks in the forms of dreams and memories. Set in the U.S. during the pre-Civil Rights era when segregation laws barred Black Americans from enjoying the same basic human rights as their white counterparts. The novel opens in the South (Greenwood, South Carolina), although the majority of the action takes place in the North (Harlem, New York).
Two quotes by Ralph Ellison below which summarises his feelings:
“I am an invisible man. No I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe: Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me.” – Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
“Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.” ― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Join us at 12:00pm to hear David’s seminar at Birkbeck on 31st March 2012.
