Korey Garibaldi
From Princeton to Pushkin. Paul Robeson in and Beyond the Black Press
This talk explores how Paul Robeson was portrayed and reported on in the American media over the course of his career. From the publication of Eslanda Robeson’s Paul Robeson, Negro (1930), the literate public learned how Paul’s early life was shaped by racially segregated Princeton—which he fought against. Decades later, popular sympathy with Robeson’s challenges to the American color line was diminished during the early Cold War years, when his patriotism was questioned. This talk will consider how these shifts coincided with Robeson’s highly-publicized celebration of Russia’s mixed-race national poet, Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837).
Korey Garibaldi is Associate Professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He studies the social and intellectual history of the United States and Europe from the 18th to the 20th century, with particular interests ranging from Henry James to Aleksandr Pushkin. His courses focus on histories of citizenship, imperialism, cultural and economic thought, and the African diaspora. Garibaldi’s first book, Impermanent Blackness: The Making and Unmaking of Interracial Literary Culture in Modern America (2023), examines and reinterprets the intermittent flourishing of cross-racial industrial print production in the United States between the early 1910s and the late 1960s. Impermanent Blackness shows how innumerable professional and technological challenges to the publishing industry’s color line, now taken for granted, were once central to the promotion of cosmopolitan habits and mentalities during the first seven decades of the twentieth century.