Background
Hutchinson, George Bain was born on November 21, 1953 in Evanston, Illinois, United States. Son of James Moore and Iris Louise (Bain) Hutchinson.
( Born to a Danish seamstress and a black West Indian co...)
Born to a Danish seamstress and a black West Indian cook in one of the Western Hemisphere's most infamous vice districts, Nella Larsen (1891-1964) lived her life in the shadows of America's racial divide. She wrote about that life, was briefly celebrated in her time, then was lost to later generations--only to be rediscovered and hailed by many as the best black novelist of her generation. In his search for Nella Larsen, the "mystery woman of the Harlem Renaissance," George Hutchinson exposes the truths and half-truths surrounding this central figure of modern literary studies, as well as the complex reality they mask and mirror. His book is a cultural biography of the color line as it was lived by one person who truly embodied all of its ambiguities and complexities. Author of a landmark study of the Harlem Renaissance, Hutchinson here produces the definitive account of a life long obscured by misinterpretations, fabrications, and omissions. He brings Larsen to life as an often tormented modernist, from the trauma of her childhood to her emergence as a star of the Harlem Renaissance. Showing the links between her experiences and her writings, Hutchinson illuminates the singularity of her achievement and shatters previous notions of her position in the modernist landscape. Revealing the suppressions and misunderstandings that accompany the effort to separate black from white, his book addresses the vast consequences for all Americans of color-line culture's fundamental rule: race trumps family.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674021800/?tag=2022091-20
( It wasn't all black or white. It wasn't a vogue. It wa...)
It wasn't all black or white. It wasn't a vogue. It wasn't a failure. By restoring interracial dimensions left out of accounts of the Harlem Renaissance--or blamed for corrupting it--George Hutchinson transforms our understanding of black (and white) literary modernism, interracial literary relations, and twentieth-century cultural nationalism in the United States. What has been missing from literary histories of the time is a broader sense of the intellectual context of the Harlem Renaissance, and Hutchinson supplies that here: Boas's anthropology, Park's sociology, various strands of pragmatism and cultural nationalism--ideas that shaped the New Negro movement and the literary field, where the movement flourished. Hutchinson tracks the resulting transformation of literary institutions and organizations in the 1920s, offering a detailed account of the journals and presses, black and white, that published the work of the "New Negroes." This cultural excavation discredits bedrock assumptions about the motives of white interest in the renaissance, and about black relationships to white intellectuals of the period. It also allows a more careful investigation than ever before of the tensions among black intellectuals of the 1920s. Hutchinson's analysis shows that the general expansion of literature and the vogue of writing cannot be divorced from the explosion of black literature often attributed to the vogue of the New Negro--any more than the growing sense of "Negro" national consciousness can be divorced from expanding articulations and permutations of American nationality. The book concludes with the first full-scale interpretation of the landmark anthology The New Negro. A courageous work that exposes the oversimplifications and misrepresentations of popular readings of the Harlem Renaissance, this book reveals the truly composite nature of American literary culture.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674372638/?tag=2022091-20
English and American studies educator
Hutchinson, George Bain was born on November 21, 1953 in Evanston, Illinois, United States. Son of James Moore and Iris Louise (Bain) Hutchinson.
AB, Brown University, 1975. Master of Arts, Indiana University, 1980. Doctor of Philosophy, Indiana University, 1983.
Well digger United States Peace Corps, Burkina Faso, W. Africa, 1975-1977. Graduate fellow American studies program Indiana University, Bloomington, 1977-1978, associate instructor department English, 1978-1982. Assistant professor English University Tennessee, Knoxville, 1982-1988, associate professor English, 1988-1996, professor, 1996-2000.
Chair literary studies Indiana University, Bloomington, since 2000, chair department English, since 2006. Chairman American studies program University Tennessee, Knoxville, 1987-2000.
( Born to a Danish seamstress and a black West Indian co...)
( It wasn't all black or white. It wasn't a vogue. It wa...)
Member Modern Language Association, South Atlantic Modern Language Association, American Studies Association, Walt Whitman Association, Knoxville Rowing Association (president 1985-1998).
Married Portia Babbette Spencer, August 28, 1982. Children: Spencer Paul, Geoffrey Bain.