NC Literary Lights: Charles Chesnutt

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Credit www.loa.org/chesnutt/

The Wife of His Youth by Charles Chesnutt

Decades before the influential writers and thinkers of the Harlem Renaissance began to challenge prevailing American understandings of race and society, Charles Chesnutt was building a foundation for their work. A teacher and writer who lived for much of his life in Fayetteville, Chesnutt imagined a world where race was irrelevant and injustice could be faced down with nonviolence. In recent years, an increasing number of academics and artists have turned their attentions to Chesnutt, whose work was in danger of being forgotten. As part of our occasional North Carolina Literary Lights series, host Frank Stasio talks about Chesnutt's legacy with Dante James, a filmmaker and instructor at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies and its African and African American Studies program; and Gene Gorman, a PhD candidate in English at Boston College.