Since they first appeared in the early nineteenth century, periodicals published by and for Black Americans have been essential building blocks of Black American culture. They played unique and powerful roles as community forums, political pedestals, artistic and intellectual cultivators, and tools for both the celebration and advancement of Black American life. This lecture dives into the archives for a discussion of the profound affects that these media had—and continue to have—on Black American culture.

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The mythology surrounding F. Scott Fitzgerald tends to eclipse his fierce devotion to his craft, a commitment animated by many sources, including music. The centennial of what many consider his greatest work, The Great Gatsby, provides ripe opportunity to reconsider our assumptions about it, along with Fitzgerald’s musical sources that are often obscured by the misleading designation of him as “America’s patron saint of the Jazz Age.” Fitzgerald knew very little about Jazz, but readers nevertheless want to read Gatsby as the author’s prose incarnation of it. This talk considers the connections, both viable and far-fetched, between the novel and the musical tropes that inspired it.

Nicole J. Camastra holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Georgia and serves as Director of the Signature Scholars Research Program at The O’Neal School in North Carolina. She is currently living in Oslo, Norway as a Fulbright Roving Scholar in American Studies and is the author of several essays on American literature. Her recent monograph, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the Muse of Romantic Music, was published by McFarland Press in 2023.

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Ernest Hemingway avoided being a political writer. He wrote to the Russian critic Ivan Kashkin in 1935 that an author “owes no allegiance to any government” and that, if any good, “he will never like” the one “he lives under.” Limiting one’s artistic eye to class consciousness, for example, demonstrates a limited talent because “all classes are [the writer’s] province” (Selected Letters 419). Nevertheless, his 1933 story “The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio” is arguably one of his most implicitly political, for Hemingway was conscious of the difficulties faced by many Americans in the early 1930s, especially Mexican immigrants. In particular, this talk focuses on what Hemingway referred to as the “sugar beet racket” in Montana and the West and on the author’s oft-overlooked sympathy towards the immigrants who powered it.

Nicole J. Camastra holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Georgia and serves as Director of the Signature Scholars Research Program at The O’Neal School in North Carolina. She is currently living in Oslo, Norway as a Fulbright Roving Scholar in American Studies and is the author of several essays on American literature. Her recent monograph, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the Muse of Romantic Music, was published by McFarland Press in 2023.

You can download the poster for the event here.