SAPIENS-TaalX Talks: Stories (Re)Contextualized: Language, Culture, Politics
Interdisciplinary research lecture series co-organized by sector plan group TaalX: Language in Context and the ICOG theme group Storytelling as Power – Identity, Equity, iNclusion, Sustainability (SAPIENS).
Organizers: Joanna Chojnicka and T.D. (Tekla) Mecsnóber
Upcoming talk
Tuesday 16 December 2025, 15:30-17:00 (room 1314.0042).
Sarah Gleeson-White (Unviersity of Sydney):
“Little Harlem’s Little Magazines: Black Literary Los Angeles Between the Wars”
Abstract
New York City and, more recently, Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington DC, are the sites that continue to inform scholarly approaches to and understandings of the New Negro Renaissance of the 1920s. One consequence of such spatial framing has been the obscuring of the contemporaneous near-frenzy of Black cultural production taking place on the West coast.
In this paper, building on important histories of early twentieth-century Black California—Douglass Flamming’s, Emily Lutenski’s, Catherine Parsons Smith’s, Daniel Widener’s, Alison Rose Jefferson’s—I unearth the thriving Black literary scene of 1920s and 1930s Los Angeles.
Clustered around Central Avenue, this “little Harlem,” as Chandler Owen described it in 1922, included authors (Wallace Thurman, Arna Bontemps), journalists (Fay Jackson) and musicians (Harold Bruce Forsythe), and was supported by several Black periodicals and literary societies. (Owen Chandler, “From Coast to Coast,” The Messenger May 1922, 409.)
Here, I focus on two Black ‘little magazines’ that have attracted next-to-no scholarly attention: The Outlet (1924-1925) and Flash (1929-1930). Thurman, who founded and edited The Outlet, declared it “the first western Negro literary magazine,” and in many ways, it was a rehearsal for his better-known, 1929 Harlem-based little magazine, Fire!!. Jackson, with James W. McGregor, edited Flash, a magazine that Alice Dunbar Nelson described as “a miniature Tatler.” Both The Outlet and Flash published columns about Los Angeles’ social, political and cultural life, in addition to fiction and poems, and book reviews, among much else. These important, albeit short-lived, little magazines provide invaluable insights into Black Los Angeles of the interwar period. They also remind us of the centrality of periodical culture to the New Negro Renaissance, and more, that Harlem’s own cultural flourishing did not emerge out of nowhere—nor from the Great Migration from South to North alone. As it turns out, it had been percolating in California.
About Sarah Gleeson-White
Sarah Gleeson-White is Associate Professor in English at the University of Sydney. Her scholarship in early-20th-century U.S., including African American, literature and film has appeared in PMLA, Modernism/modernity, American Literature, African American Review and elsewhere. Her books include William Faulkner at Twentieth Century-Fox (Oxford UP 2017) and most recently Silent Film and the Formations of U.S. Literary Culture: Literature in Motion (Oxford UP 2024), and she is the lead editor of The New William Faulkner Studies (Cambridge UP 2022). Her current book project, generously supported in part by a 2025 Groningen Faculty of Arts Senior Research Fellowship, is Wallace Thurman, 1922-1934: Black Authorship and Print Culture Between the Wars.
Past talks
Friday 10 October 2025, 15:00-17:00 (room 1314.0042)
Steven Gilbers (University of Groningen):
“Criminal Slang”: The Role of Language in Hip-Hop Storytelling
Abstract
In hip-hop culture, language plays a central role. Hip-hop heads typically have extensive knowledge about language, and they see language not simply as “a means of communication,” but “as a series of choices that represent beliefs and have consequences” (Morgan, 2001, p. 190). The language of hip-hop is in great part shaped by “[hip-hop] heads’ unabated drive for stylistic distinction, creativity, manipulation of grammar and pronunciation, and the politics and pleasure involved in their use of the verbal art of slang” (Alim, 2015, p. 850), and nothing exemplifies this notion like the art of hip-hop lyricism, also known as the poetics of rap.
In this talk, I will dissect how hip-hop lyricists manipulate language to shape the narratives of their music. I will address how rappers use street slang to intentionally obfuscate meaning, how they play with grammar and phonology to create ambiguity, and how this all ties into some of the central tenets of hip-hop culture and Black Atlantic creative practice. Ultimately, the talk aims to highlight the importance of language in hip-hop storytelling, showing how a linguistic approach can be used to better understand the nuances of rappers’ cultural and political commentary.
About Steven Gilbers
Steven Gilbers (September 25, 1991) is an assistant professor in English Linguistics at the University of Groningen, specialized in the field of hip-hop linguistics. His research focuses on the connection between language and music in a hip-hop context, regional variation in African-American English speech and rap flows, the role language plays in hip-hop culture, and the phonetics of hip-hop lyricism (i.e., the poetics of rap). Gilbers is a former Fulbright scholar (NYU and UCLA), and is currently co-organizing the upcoming interdisciplinary European Hip Hop Studies Conference in Groningen (March 18-21, 2026). Aside from his academic endeavors, he is also active as a rapper affiliated with American music label FiveSe7en Collective, and he is involved with Dutch hip-hop platform Homebase.