Dr. Bill E. Lawson and Mr. Obataiye B. Akinwole
Frederick Douglas and the Irish Famine: Music, Suffering, and the Sorrow of Songs
Recorded February 27, 2014
Dr. Bill E. Lawson is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Memphis, specializing in African American, Social, and Political Philosophy.
Mr. Obataiye B. Akinwole is a composer and independent scholar. He was one of the founding members of WAFR, a radio station celebrating African history, politics, and culture.
This lecture intends to inspire a reassessment of the life and times of Frederick Douglass as an aesthete. This investigation of Douglass's aesthetic sensibilities is approached in an interdisciplinary manner drawing on the disciplines of philosophy, music, history, American, and Irish Studies. It is concluded that Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and great orator, was also an aesthetician and ethnomusicologist.
