CESTA Seminar | C. Brown "A walk with Horton in the 19th century using virtual reality and geospatial tools"

Using digital tools, virtual reality, and augmented reality, Dr. Brown enters into the life of the slave poet and Black Holocaust Survivor, George Moses Horton. This lecture tracks Horton’s life from his early days as an oral poet to his later written poetryand takes stock of how this dynamic figure not only changed the history of the American South but continues to resonate in spoken word and hiphop.

Cecil Brown was born in Bolton, a farm village near Wilmington, North Carolina, where he attended segregated grade school and high school. As a freshman at A&T College, Greensboro, he participated in the student movement that desegregated Woolworth's and other “white only” institutions throughout the South. While a student of Comparative Literature at Columbia University, he met and was influenced by poet and activist LeRoi Jones (later Baraka) and the Black Arts Movement. After receiving his M.A. from the University of Chicago, Brown published his first novel, The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1969). In 1970, Brown began teaching in the English Department at UC Berkeley. After meeing Richard Pryor there in 1972, Brown moved to Hollywood to work with Pryor on his film, Which Way Is Up?, which Mr. Brown co-wrote. He later published a novel, Days Without Weather (1983), about this experience. Brown received his Ph.D from UC Berkeley in 1993 and published his thesis as Stagolee Shot Billy (Harvard University Press, 2003).  Currently, he teaches at Stanford and UC Berkeley.