Brent Hayes Edwards Lecture

Brent Hayes Edwards (Columbia) will present his digital restoration, from the original 16mm reels, of the legendary short film Sweet Willie Rollbar’s Orientation. Featuring an original soundtrack by saxophonist Julius Hemphill, the film was made in the spring of 1972 by Hemphill, the poet K. Curtis Lyle, the actor Malinke Elliott, and other members of the Black Artists’ Group of St. Louis. An astonishing document of the post-Black Arts period, the film includes a series of fragmented, surreal “trickster tale” vignettes set in the detritus of the St. Louis inner city. In his keynote directly following the screening, Edwards will place the film in the context of the Black Artists’ Group, and more broadly in relation to other black experiments in multimedia aesthetics in the early 1970s.


Brent Edwards is a Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Jazz Studies and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. He is also the Director of the Scholars-in-Residence Program at the Schomburg Center of the New York Public Library. His books include The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard University Press, 2003), which was awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association, the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Society for French Historical Studies, and runner-up for the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association; the co-edited essay collection Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (Columbia University Press, 2004); and scholarly editions of classic works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, and Joseph Conrad. Edwards was the co-editor of the journal Social Text from 2001-2011, and served as the Harlem Renaissance period editor for the Third Edition of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature (2014).

Edwards published three books in 2017: a scholarly edition (in collaboration with Jean-Christophe Cloutier) of Claude McKay’s long-lost novel, Amiable with Big Teeth (Penguin Classics); Edwards’s translation of Michel Leiris’s monumental 1934 Phantom Africa (Seagull Books), and Edwards’s own monograph Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (Harvard University Press). Edwards is currently at work on three different projects. First, he is completing a book called “Black Radicalism and the Archive” (based on the Du Bois Lectures he presented at Harvard in 2015) about the collecting activities of black political activists, artists, and intellectuals including Arturo Schomburg, Hubert Harrison, Ada “Bricktop” Smith, Alexander Gumby, and C. L. R. James. In another long-term project, Edwards is working on a book-length cultural history of the downtown New York “loft jazz” scene in New York in the 1970s, when musicians such as Ornette Coleman, Sam Rivers, Rashied Ali, and Joe Lee Wilson opened their own performance spaces in SoHo, NoHo and the East Village. And finally, Edwards is writing another study called “Art of the Lecture” (about lectures as a genre combining pedagogy and performance), a book project he began during his tenure as a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow.