The Paris Salons. The Dark Tower. The Well. The Harman Academy. From 18th century Paris to the Harlem Renaissance to 20th century internet platforms to our own 21st century Harman Academy at USC—these spaces have brought together diverse people to explore, debate, create, innovate, agitate for change, or simply feed one’s curiosities. One Harman Fellow expressed her experience in the Academy this way:
“I admittedly first stumbled on the Harman Academy as I was in search of free pizza but found the talks to feed a different type of hunger that kept me returning.”
For this year’s Polymathic Pizza Series, we will explore contemporary concerns by engaging the format and richness of the salon. Salons have a long history of being a space for writers, artists, philosophers, and activists to express their thinking and creative energies, to test run ideas with others with critical interrogation in a civil and open-minded environment. The salons in 18th century Paris and England, for instance, were gatherings driven by discussion around politics, philosophy, science, and literature. Regulars at these salons included Benjamin Franklin, Rousseau, Diderot, and the Thomases -- Jefferson and Paine. They were organized and run by prominent, educated women in their private homes, which allowed these salonnières a degree of power, agency, and freedom that was denied them beyond these spaces.
During the 1920s, salonnière A’Lelia Walker, heiress to her mother’s cosmetic empire, held weekly gatherings at her home in Harlem to bring together African American artists, writers, and political radicals. Writer Countee Cullen, one of the most representative voices of the Harlem Renaissance, dubbed Walker’s salon, The Dark Tower, and among those who regularly gathered there were Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, and W.E.B. DuBois. “A’Leila Walker,” wrote Hughes, “was “the joy goddess of Harlem” because her home was filled with the exchange of ideas, a “dynamic site for synergistic experimentation and politically radical creativity.” African American Literary scholar William J. Harris writes that these “salons played a critical role in the clustering of ideas, in linking people,” while also fostering a degree of empowerment, agency, and freedom that was otherwise denied African Americans beyond these demarcated spaces.
Salons then and now are social, technological, and intellectual laboratories. The Harman Academy, both in Doheny and Leavey Libraries, is in every sense a modern-day salon. For our 2024-2025 season, we issue a call to students and faculty to come together to carry on the salon tradition, where the exchange of ideas and the fostering of creativity remains alive and well.
