Timothy Pantoja | The Hum of Reflection

Studying Absorption in Henry Ossawa Tanner’s The Banjo Lesson and Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Voice of the Banjo.

Join the Department of African and African American Studies (DAAAS) for an enlightening talk by Mellon Fellow and Lecturer, Dr. Timothy Pantoja.

Abstract: The Banjo Lesson (1893) by Henry Tanner portrays an elder and child absorbed during musical instruction. While celebrated and reproduced as a positive representation of intergenerational bonding and quiet thinking, this talk highlights the ways the painting instructs and invites a beholder’s absorption. Tanner frames a scene of banjo playing as visually analogous to book reading. In so doing, Tanner improvises upon a genre of painted readers that art theorists engage to idolize the book as the pinnacle object to generate absorption. By showing how Tanner recasts the banjo as a book, I show the ways this painting elevates the banjo as not just an instrument of performance but reflection. The talk also considers the ways Dunbar’s “The Voice of the Banjo” (1898) also recasts the banjo as a book to reenvision how Black absorption looks and sounds. Near the end of a century marked by anti-literacy laws, Tanner and Dunbar use their respective mediums to illuminate the banjo with an aura of literacy. I explore the political dimensions of these scenes of absorption by thinking about their resonance with W.E.B. Du Bois’s emerging concept of double consciousness, which was first published in his 1903 work, The Souls of Black Folk.

About the Speaker

Timothy Pantoja is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer at the Department of African and African American Studies. Dr. Pantoja is a minister and scholar of literature whose research is invested in exploring the ways Black art and literature render the social, relational, and emotional conditions upon which theories and performances of art rely. He previously was the Medical Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in the English Department at New York University where he taught courses exploring the ways art, literature, and humanistic inquiry offer resources to engage the hidden aspects of health, illness, and recovery. He received his Master of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School, where he studied the lingering theological undertow within literature, poetry, and theory.