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Adrienne Herndon's Homeplaces: Shakespeare and Black Resistance in Atlanta, c.1906
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 December 2019
Abstract
This essay examines the political significance of the career of Atlanta-based Shakespearean Adrienne McNeil Herndon in the early twentieth century. It contextualizes Herndon's writing in the activist journal Voice of the Negro and elucidates the radicalism of Herndon's Shakespeare work at Atlanta University and beyond. More broadly, the essay shows how Herndon's performances and pedagogy – especially her focus on elocution work, bodily expressivity, domestic spaces, and visual culture – repeatedly challenged the white supremacist culture of the Jim Crow South, offering black Americans a way to resist racial terrorism and endure racial trauma.
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References
1 Adrienne E. Herndon, “Shakespeare at Atlanta University,” Voice of the Negro (hereafter VN), July 1906, 482–86. On the journal see Harlan, Louis R., “Booker T. Washington and the Voice of the Negro, 1904–1907,” Journal of Southern History, 45, 1 (Feb. 1979), 45–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Bullock, Penelope L., “Profile of a Periodical: The Voice of the Negro,” Atlanta Historical Bulletin, 21 (Spring 1977), 99–110Google Scholar.
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