Emily Bernard – författare

A groundbreaking inquiry into the life of the audacious Carl Van Vechten, and his singular and singularly controversial contributions to the Harlem RenaissanceCarl Van Vechten was a white man with a passion for blackness who played a crucial role in helping the Harlem Renaissance, a black movement, come to understand itself. Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance is grounded in the dramas occasioned by the Harlem Renaissance, as it is called today, or New Negro Renaissance, as it was called in the 1920s, when it first came into being. Emily Bernard focuses on writing—the black and white of things—the articles, fiction, essays, and letters that Carl Van Vechten wrote to black people and about black culture, and the writing of the black people who wrote to and about him. Above all, she is interested in the interpersonal exchanges that inspired the writing, which are ultimately far more significant than the public records would suggest.This book is a partial biography of a once controversial figure. It is not a comprehensive history of an entire life, but rather a chronicle of one of his lives, his black life, which began in his boyhood and thrived until his death. The narrative at the core of Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance is not an attempt to answer the question of whether Van Vechten was good or bad for black people, or whether or not he hurt or helped black creative expression during the Harlem Renaissance. As Bernard writes, the book instead “enlarges that question into something much richer and more nuanced: a tale about the messy realities of race, and the complicated tangle of black and white.”

A New Statesman essential non-fiction read of 2021'Everybody should read [this]' Stylist"Blackness is an art, not a science. It is a paradox: intangible and visceral; a situation and a story. It is the thread that connects these essays, but its significance as an experience emerges randomly, unpredictably. . . . Race is the story of my life, and therefore black is the body of this book."In twelve intensely personal, interconnected essays, Emily Bernard sets out to tell stories from her life that enable her to talk about truth, race, family and relationships, and much more. She observes the complexities and paradoxes, the haunting memories and ambushing realities of growing up black in the South with a family name inherited from a white man, of getting a PhD from Yale, of marrying a white man from the North, of adopting two babies from Ethiopia, of teaching at a white college and living in America's New England today.Ultimately, she shows us that it is in our shared experience of humanity that we find connection, happiness and hope.What readers are saying:'Perspective changing essays' *****'A page-turner - full of empathy, love, and insight' *****'I raced through this' *****'I loved it' *****'Exquisitely crafted' *****'Essential reading' *****'I couldn't put it down' *****'Beautifully written. A must read for all races' *****'I loved everything about this book' *****