February 18, 2022
This talk, part of a larger project about the Oceanic Humanities and the literature of the Black Diaspora, focuses on Captain Harry Foster Dean, a neglected figure in Black history who sought to build an empire in Southern Africa. In a review of Dean’s thrilling 1929 memoir, W.E.B. Du Bois recalled meeting Dean and called him “bitter.” But Dean had good reason for this bitterness, considering the aggression he faced from European imperialists in Africa at the turn of the century, one of whom called him “the most dangerous ‘Negro’ in the world.” Although the maritime adventures Dean describes make the oceans sound treacherous, it is on land—particularly his Cape Colony headquarters during the Second Boer War—that he is most vulnerable. Finding safety in the sea, Dean presents his survival of several oceanic trials as proof of his fitness for Black transnational leadership.
Nadia Nurhussein is Professor in English and Africana Studies, specializing in African American literature and culture. She is the author of Black Land: Imperial Ethiopianism and African America (Princeton University Press, 2019; winner of the Modernist Studies Association Book Award), and Rhetorics of Literacy: The Cultivation of American Dialect Poetry (The Ohio State University Press, 2013). Prior to arriving at Johns Hopkins, Prof. Nurhussein taught in the English departments at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, from 2005 to 2016 and at Mount Holyoke College from 2004 to 2005. In 2004, she earned her PhD in English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale University, and the American Council of Learned Societies.