Clyde Taylor

Clyde R. Taylor is a cultural historian whose training and experience lie mainly in literary and film studies. His teaching explores narratives of cultural self-imagining as they have been fashioned by African and African diaspora societies, as well as the way these narratives intersect with counternarratives of Western civilization. He has curated and programmed film and art exhibitions at several institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Brooklyn Museum. His writings include Vietnam and Black America as editor, Black Genius as coeditor, and The Mask of Art, for which he received the Josephine Miles-Oakland PEN Award. He also wrote the script for the PBS documentary Midnight Ramble, the Life and Legacy of Oscar Micheaux. He has received several grants and fellowships, including a Fulbright Fellowship, Ford, Rockefeller, and residencies at the Whitney, Bellagio Research Center, and Museum of African Art (D.C.). He has been elected to the National Hall of Fame of Writers of African Descent, and he has received an "Indie" for critical writing on films of minorities, as well as a Callaloo Prize for nonfiction prose. His current writing project involves alternative modernisms in non-European contexts.