CMS faculty members will be presenting at this year's Humanities Day on Saturday October 16, 2021.
Hannah Arendt and the Humanities
Presented by D.N. Rodowick
October 16, 2021 at 1:30 PM
In recent decades, the value of a humanist education has been criticized from all sides with doubts cast upon its relevance in an increasingly precarious world. The presenter defends a philosophical education in the humanities not in terms of canons, methods, or disciplines to be mastered, nor even knowledges and skills to be acquired and transferred. But rather, the humanities are something deeper and more fundamental—the continuous forging of a revisable moral life guided by reason in open and contingent intersubjective conversations with others. In other words, the humanities in its deepest sense conceived as a lifelong education in judgment. Teaching in the humanities has no more important goal.
Early Black Cinema in Chicago: Lost and Found
Presented by Allyson Nadia Field
October 16, 2021 at 3:00 PM
In 1916, the Ebony Film Corporation was formed in Chicago with the goal of producing short comedies featuring all-African American casts. While white-capitalized, the company hired an African American producer, Luther J. Pollard, as its President and General Manager. The film’s comedies were aimed at general audiences and focused on the slapstick comedy popular in the mainstream industry. What were Pollard’s ambitions? How did he understand his work in relation to the constraints around Black representation in the broader American film industry? Until recently, very little information about the company has been known to survive, and scholars of African American film history have long puzzled over Pollard’s involvement with Ebony. Through new material the Chicago Film Archives discovered about Pollard, the presenter discusses the work of Ebony, its relation to other Black filmmaking companies, and the Chicago-based film industry of the 1910s.