Home as Cultural Memory: Albert Murray and South to a Very Old Place
Location
Janet Ayers Academic Center, JAAC 4094
Presentation Type
Presentation
Start Date
21-9-2017 10:00 AM
Description
The cultural critic Albert Murray’s South to a Very Old Place defies easy categorization. The book is at once an idiosyncratic travelogue of the author’s journey back home to the American South after many years away and an extended, rambling commentary on any number of matters cultural and literary. South to a Very Old Place has a high bar of entry for the uninitiated, so it rewards close readings. Like his close friend Ralph Ellison, Murray’s figured American experience was at bottom an inclusive idea of black experience, at least for those willing to get with it. So, in the book Murray merged what he called elsewhere a “collective experience” of black America with his own as he traveled through the South of his past and his present. Steeped in the fables and tall tales of slaves, existentially burnished under Jim Crow, ancient in historical consciousness, wherever they may be in this country black people were home, carrying with them the essential truth of America. This talk considers the ins and outs of Murray’s perspective as a way of complicating and nuancing various and commonplace ideas of home.
Recommended Citation
Kuryla, Peter, "Home as Cultural Memory: Albert Murray and South to a Very Old Place" (2017). Humanities Symposium. 16.
https://repository.belmont.edu/humanities_symposium/2017/2017/16
Home as Cultural Memory: Albert Murray and South to a Very Old Place
Janet Ayers Academic Center, JAAC 4094
The cultural critic Albert Murray’s South to a Very Old Place defies easy categorization. The book is at once an idiosyncratic travelogue of the author’s journey back home to the American South after many years away and an extended, rambling commentary on any number of matters cultural and literary. South to a Very Old Place has a high bar of entry for the uninitiated, so it rewards close readings. Like his close friend Ralph Ellison, Murray’s figured American experience was at bottom an inclusive idea of black experience, at least for those willing to get with it. So, in the book Murray merged what he called elsewhere a “collective experience” of black America with his own as he traveled through the South of his past and his present. Steeped in the fables and tall tales of slaves, existentially burnished under Jim Crow, ancient in historical consciousness, wherever they may be in this country black people were home, carrying with them the essential truth of America. This talk considers the ins and outs of Murray’s perspective as a way of complicating and nuancing various and commonplace ideas of home.
Comments
Convocation Credit: Society and the Arts and Sciences