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Folger Shakespeare Library Workshop at Buffalo, “Gilding the Guilt: The Gilded Age, Craft Production and the Construction of Cultural Capital” (April 27-30)
April 27, 2023 - April 30, 2023
For more information, including a complete schedule and list of participants, please visit the workshop website at https://shakespearegildbuffalo.wordpress.com/events/ or contact me at bbono@buffalo.edu or 716-207-0690.
Gilding the Guilt: The Gilded Age, Craft Production, and the Construction of Cultural Capital
Organized by Barbara Bono, Carrie Tirado Bramen, Maria Horne, and Stacy Carson Hubbard
Co-Sponsored with the Departments of English and Theatre and Dance at the University of Buffalo, and the University at Buffalo Library, and the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library
Five years in the planning, one-year COVID-delayed, including over 12 events involving 32 participants supported by 4 Keynote speakers, 4 Guest Scholars, 10 librarians, 15 theater historians and practitioners, and 15 trained and credited undergraduate and graduate students, and taking place in the libraries of both UB and the Buffalo & Erie County Public Libraries, the Western New York Book Arts Center (WNYBAC), Ujima Theater, The Roycroft Campus and throughout a historical tour of the city, the Workshop combines a consideration of the intersectional categories of race, class, and culture focusing on the reception of Shakespeare in both the read and performance traditions, pivoting on 1901, the year of the Pan American Exposition, and running down to the present day.
What role has “Shakespeare” played in reinforcing and contesting wealth and class, and how should scholars critically reconsider that tension at a moment when economic injustice has been so starkly underlined for all Americans? This workshop considers these questions with the case study of Buffalo, New York, a regional city situated at a geographic and historical crossroads in America. While Buffalo’s wealth and cultural opportunities were unevenly distributed, its elite’s ambitions were vast and included an aggressive practice of Gilded Age book collecting, focused on Shakespeare. Meanwhile major cultural countercurrents included the American Arts and Craft movement headquartered at the nearby Roycroft Campus. Topics to be discussed include the tensions found in late-nineteenth-century American cities during the fraught economic, industrial, and cultural expansion of the Gilded Age, especially those involving studies into non-elite acculturation through Shakespeare and other signifiers of high culture, and creative American counter-responses to European art and culture that continue to resonate today. Scholars working on these and related topics are welcome to attend.
A video description of the workshop may be found here.
Organizers: Barbara Bono is Associate Professor Emerita of English and of the Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Buffalo. Carrie Tirado Bramen is Professor of English at the University at Buffalo. Maria S. Horne is Associate Professor of Theatre and Dance at the University at Buffalo. Stacy Carson Hubbard is Associate Professor of English at the University at Buffalo.
Program: Thursday afternoon and evening will offer two opening plenaries. The first features novelist Lauren Belfer, whose novel City of Light revolves around the 1901 Pan-American Exposition. It will be followed by a panel of three distinguished scholars who will speak on Shakespeare in relation to African-American culture, frontiers / la frontera, and Indigenous reception and adaptation: Joyce Green MacDonald (University of Kentucky), Kathryn Vomero Santos (Trinity University), and Scott Manning Stevens (Syracuse University). Subsequent workshop sessions will involve the organizers and local librarians and archivists at the downtown Buffalo and Erie County Library, the University at Buffalo Libraries, and the Roycroft Campus.
