Virgo season has started. My Virgo moon says:
Gave a short presentation on Africana Teaching at the Inheritance Baltimore Orientation. More on Inheritance Baltimore, the Mellon-funded project led by Drs. Nathan Connolly and Larry Jackson, here. There I discussed the way my pedagogy is built with and through Darlene Clark Hine’s manifesto on the Black Studies Mind.
Read Hine for yourself here.
The best part of this week is that NEXT week the Black World Seminar returns. Co-convened this fall by myself and Dr. Larry Jackson, we have READINGS and we will be discussing all the things. We are Black and we are STILL here. Come celebrate.
For more on the Black World Seminar see Dr. Nathan Connolly's essay, "Come Celebrate a Black World" published as part of the Taller Electric Marronage Fugitive Handbook here.
The #SlaveryArchive book club is also continuing to run. If you haven’t taken a look at the next fall semester of readings, you can view it here. The next event in the series is SEPTEMBER 1, 2021, WEDNESDAY, 5:00 PM (EST): The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2021)edited by P. Gabrielle Foreman (Penn State University),Jim Casey (Penn State University), and Sarah Lynn Patterson(University of Massachusetts Amherst). To attend on Zoom, register HERE. You can also watch it on Youtube.
What I’m reading.
Not a lot of reading this week. The Sky Babies are still sick with whatever bug is flying around. They’ve been out of daycare all week which means writing/reading/research time is scarce. I’m also prepping for a return to teaching next week.
I do have this in queue for reading on my phone between snot sop ups, with photographs by Allison Janae Hamilton: Misty Shores and Palm Forests: Southern Spirituality Through the Lens of Film and Art by Jasmine Webber https://burnaway.org/magazine/misty-shores/
What I’m watching.
I managed to binge the Chair one morning and….
I laughed OUT loud. So many times!! This was a fun, dark, and “hits too close too home” watch. I suspect those in the academy or at least adjacent to it will catch and laugh at the nuances the most.
But I also think there is a kind of fantasy of the material and social life of the (white) professoriate that has been sold in movies and TV since at least the eighties that the Chair works on and through. The marble halls of the academic building. The dark wood of the seminar rooms. The rapt attention of a small group of committed, overeager, engaged students, faces turned up to watch you expound on this or relate that point. The I’m-just-not-serious-about-fashion-Miranda-Priestly fashion of it all with its dark pleated pants, black turtlenecks, elbow patches, blazers, sweaters, wool, tweed. The disheveled young white male professor who is hapless (or downright abusive) in social situations, but somehow brilliant at his own work and though unconventionally attractive in the real world is also somehow incredibly attractive to very conventionally attractive and competent women (of color). The older white male professor who feels threatened by the work and teaching of his younger peers and acts out in a host of unseemly ways. The essential labor of the academy that flickers on the sidelines and in and out of scenes--administrators, wives, caregivers, teaching assistants—giving just enough presence to highlight the fumbles of the characters, just enough real world capability to connect with the viewer already wondering how and why these cushioned professors can’t get their lives together. The children who run happily across the quad like it belongs to them, because they were born into academic royalty. The undergraduate students who are mostly cardboard characters meant to highlight the qualms and foibles of the faculty.
The Chair had or drew on all of these academia-on-screen elements, and even updated some for the present moment. Characters like Yaz, the only Black woman in the department, and Joan, the stalwart second wave white feminist and first woman hired, are bookends on what the new wave of the professoriate is like these days, adding new characters to this fantasy university world. Yaz’s classroom was the only classroom I recognized, not only in composition and topic, but in the delicious physical disruption that the students’ activities made in a space obviously not meant for, say, a rap performance inspired by Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.
But in the Chair, the center of the fantasy built by Woody Allen inspired art house film culture still holds, and it is the fantasy that I find interesting. Because it isn’t real, and any professor (I’m sure all the aggrieved think pieces are already saying) will tell you that the Chair isn’t real in this way or that way. At the very least because most universities aren’t small, elite institutions set in a small town somewhere in the northeast (by the look of the landscape it was the northeast; the Chair was actually filmed in Pennsylvania). Most students aren’t even attending that particular kind of university this fall. And there’s a whole other genre of higher education-on-screen that draws on HBCU/Black experiences that wasn’t really accessed for the Chair (i.e. A Different World, Higher Learning, Dear White People). Never mind the higher education experiences on reservations and at HSIs.
But it IS true that there is a type of professor/dean/administrator and even non-university person that believes that the university is a PLACE where the life of the mind lives and thrives and that PLACE has a certain feel, a certain geography, a certain energy and don't YOU think its lovely too? And the walls that hold that PLACE together, the physical walls, the economic boundaries to learning, the social conventions that punish those who transgress the “culture” aren’t bad, no no no. If they weren’t there, then how would this PLACE hold itself together? Those walls make this PLACE safe never mind that they are the plaster scaffolding of generations of plantation-empire-extraction. Again, don't YOU think this PLACE is lovely too?
I think the life of the mind is a life we all deserve to live, for those who wish to live it. I also don’t think you have to live it on a university campus. And if you do, I also think that the PLACE is still a fantasy. It exists in movies and TV shows only and it isn’t even well done there. But there is something very seductive about that vision of the university, the geography of it, the space of it, the rooms and hallways and staircases of it. The AWAYNESS of it all. Almost like you could escape from the disorder and pain of the world. Almost like your work is somehow removed from that same disorder and pain, a chaos wrought by empire. Almost like we on the campus, employed by the university, are somehow ourselves removed from that chaos, from causing it, from being enriched by it, and therefore from the responsibility of dismantling it.
Spoiler alert: We aren’t.
I wonder if the fantasy of the university as a PLACE is, for some, impossible to separate from the life of the mind and the work of a scholar. I wonder if that is why some feel so personally offended when a Yaz walks into the mail room with her afro and cute blazer and has the nerve to know how to use the copier, much less allow her students to express themselves with the knowledge systems that they have available to them rather than acculturate to the university’s way of teaching.
I will be honest: Like many Black women, I am not overeager to physically return to a space where I am reminded, from the borders of a campus that was once a slave plantation to the portraits and busts of white men, women (and one Black man) on the walls of our seminar room, that I am a first, an experiment, an exception. I am exhausted at the thought of it. My historical practice began at the kitchen table and remains there, accountable to it, infused by it and invested in what can be found there. I mean, at present, my kitchen table is full of Kleenex, a Nose Frida, and bottles of formula! So I can also appreciate the office space the university offers its employed academics—especially its caregivers who are disproportionately women—to get away from their domestic labor and have some time to read and think. But that isn’t tied to the PLACE for me. It is a labor issue and a feminism issue. What would it look like if, for those of use choosing to work remotely, the university offered us in cash what is equivalent to fringe and overhead (i.e. what it says it charges to keep the lights on) and allowed us to apply that to finding offices wherever might be useful for us? Perhaps some of us would choose to pay fees/rent at co-working spaces around the city like Impact Hub or OpenWorks? Perhaps we’d rent office space downtown? Who knows.
And also, what does it look like to be a scholar teaching histories of slavery to the community when we can’t gather as we used to? Most grassroots and community organizations are back to the work they need to do because they can’t afford not to be—not financially and not in psychically. They are masked, vaxx’d, and social distanced. They are practicing good care of their members and accountability. They are practicing accessibility by offering virtual options where their capacity lends itself to. But it is different. It isn’t the old ways there either. And they’ve been malleable, creative, and generous in how they’ve changed their modes of meeting the folk where they are. Small, local, communal. Six feet of closeness and care.
As we head back into a new semester, with so much happening in the world, and, more important, with another vision of the world right there on the tip of our tongues and the horizon in sight, I’m not going to pretend that the old ways are the only ways or the fantasy is so LOVELY. I’m not going to pretend we don’t know that another world is possible right now. Because we do. The old ways are dead. What we make of the new is going to unfold in some interesting patterns and I’m excited to imagine beyond.
happy fall,
jmj