Arturo Schomburg and the Jim Crow South
On Wednesday, Vanessa K. Valdés of The City College of New York, presented her research on Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, whose personal collection became the foundation for the Harlem-based and world-renowned Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Valdés is the author of “Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg,” only the second full-length biography.
During her talk, “Building an International Archive in the Jim Crow South: Arturo Schomberg at Fisk University,” Valdés highlighted the collector’s global vision for his collection as well as the importance of access to the material.
The lunchtime talk was the latest installment of “Wednesdays at the Center,” held at the John Hope Franklin Center, which features a different speaker each week throughout the semester.
Valdés, a professor of Spanish and Portuguese, said that Schomburg, a Black Puerto Rican, helped establish Fisk University’s Africana collection in Nashville, now named the John Hope and Aurelia Franklin Library.
“Most have no idea about the man himself,” said Valdés, who pursued her graduate degree in Nashville. There is only one biography of Schomburg and it was published in 1989, she said.
The Carnegie Foundation bought Schomburg’s personal collection for $10k which he used to travel across Europe and further develop his collection. However, he donated much of his work without compensation.
In Nashville, Thomas E. Jones was president of Fisk when Schomburg began assembling the library in 1929. He worked alongside his good friend, sociologist Charles S. Johnson, to replicate what he had accomplished in New York, building a black archive in Fisk University’s Cravath Hall, complete with a reading room.
“At the time, black people were steered toward vocational schools and not necessarily reading for pleasure,” Valdés said. Under Schomburg, Fisk established a reading room to “inculcate a desire” in students to read for pleasure.
“Being an active member of society meant being knowledgeable. He was creating spaces of liberation,” Valdés said. Schomburg spoke through his collection, highlighting moments of black independence and responding to U.S. hegemony in the Caribbean.
The Fisk collection concentrated on presence of people of African descent internationally, taking on a global character, telling the story of blacks in Europe and the Caribbean. There were 140 books when Schomburg arrived and more than 4,000 by the time he left Fisk. His efforts were not replicated at other schools until decades after his death, she said.
Johnson, the first black president of Fisk, acknowledged Schomburg’s “generosity and foresight” in curating books for the university’s then-named Race Relations Institute.
“Johnson was trying to get Schomburg to write his book but he wasn’t interested in that. He only wanted to disseminate his work,” Valdés said. “It’s important to consider different modes of scholarship and knowledge production. Establishing the collection, made it unequivocal that black folks were worthy of study and international analysis.”
The event was sponsored by the Center for Arts, Digital Culture and Entrepreneurship at Duke.
Black Joy As Resistance: Why I Do What I Do
Professor Yaba Blay, founder of #ProfessionalBlackGirl, will give a talk on Duke’s East Campus Monday evening.
The talk, “Black Joy As Resistance: Why I Do What I Do,” will be held at 6 p.m., April 16th, in the Friedl Building’s Jameson Art Gallery. Filmmaker Natalie Bullock Brown and local independent artist Natasha Walker Powell will join Blay in the discussion.
The event is free and open to the public, with nearby parking available. Light refreshments will be served.
Blay will discuss her online campaigns, #PrettyPeriod, a visual celebration of dark-skinned Black beauty, and Professional Black Girl, a web series and online community celebrating everyday, around-the-way Black girl magic. Blay will highlight how she uses Black joy as a methodology for resistance.
Blay is the Dan Blue Endowed Chair in Political Science at North Carolina Central University and has authored (1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race. A professor and ethnographer, her scholarship centers on Black racial identity, Black aesthetic practices, and Black beauty, with particular attention given to hair and skin color politics.
Named to The Root 100, an annual list of top Black influencers, Blay is one of today’s leading voices on colorism and global skin color politics. Her commentary has been featured on CNN, BET, MSNBC, NPR, The New York Times, Ebony Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Root, Huffington Post Live, Colorlines, and elsewhere.
For more information, email dcore@duke.edu.
Homeward Bound Models Tenancy Support Services for N.C.
Researchers to learn from Homeward Bound’s success with support from Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
Every person who lives in a shelter or on the streets in our community needs a combination of affordable housing, appropriate services and adequate income. The longer people are homeless, the more complex their needs become. As a consequence, homelessness ultimately costs taxpayers.
Homeward Bound, a nonprofit based in Asheville, N.C. and serving Buncombe and Henderson Counties, is dedicated to alleviating the effects of homelessness. Over the past 11 years, 89 percent of the more than 1,800 people that Homeward Bound has moved into housing have remained housed.
Now, Homeward Bound’s model of tenancy support services will expand its reach to the rest of the state. It will participate in a research project funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Interdisciplinary Research Leaders program.
The research team is made up of two Duke University faculty members and a community advocate. They are Mina Silberberg, Ph.D., an associate professor in Duke Health’s Department of Community and Family Medicine; Donna Biederman, DrPH, MN, RN, associate professor at the Duke School of Nursing; and Emily Carmody, LCSW, program director with the North Carolina Coalition to End Homelessness. The Duke Council on Race and Ethnicity (DCORE) is a collaborating partner, providing consulting and staff support services to the research team.
As part of the study, the research team will conduct interviews and focus groups with staff and program participants as well as analyze program data. By closely studying Homeward Bound’s model, the researchers will learn about promising practices for the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, which is interested in using Medicaid to fund tenancy support services across the state.
Information from the study will help to create a Medicaid funding stream that supports effective services in the field and provides more people with supportive housing.
Tenancy-focused case management services are not the typically considered health services, but these services contribute to better health outcomes and recovery. For those with ongoing disabilities, long-term housing subsidies and services are a lifeline. For communities, the result is reduced costs to jails and hospitals.
“Most people think of the emergency room and/or community mental health providers as those directly addressing the health issues that formerly homeless individuals are experiencing,” says Leslie Stewart, Homeward Bound Program Director. “However, tenancy support through case management is the frontline intervention that works to make that connection and facilitate long-term engagement so that individuals can experience lasting wellness and stability in housing. Housing is health care.”
Besides helping residents to get and keep housing, Homeward Bound also connects residents to community resources, teaching them skills that will help them maintain their home and find employment and volunteer opportunities.
Homeward Bound is one of the two programs in North Carolina chosen for the study because of their success in housing vulnerable populations. Two programs in Louisiana will be studied as well.
Says Stewart, “Housing stability is a crucial piece of the puzzle when considering overall health and wellness and is necessary to fully address these issues.”
For more information about Homeward Bound’s success, go to https://homewardboundwnc.org/stories.
A Conversation on the State of Voting Rights in N.C.
DURHAM, N.C. – On the eve of a federal briefing on voting rights in Raleigh on Friday, a panel of experts will gather at Duke Thursday night to discuss the state of voting rights in North Carolina.
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, an independent federal watchdog agency, will hold a public hearing in Raleigh, which will include testimonies about N.C. voter experiences at the polls. Ahead of the hearing, The Duke Council on Race and Ethnicity (DCORE) and The Raben Group are co-convening a Thursday, Feb. 1, panel discussion and public forum to bring attention and awareness to voting rights issues.
The free event will be held at 5:30 p.m. in the Ahmadieh Family Lecture Hall at Smith Warehouse, Bay 4, C105 (114 S. Buchanan Boulevard, Durham). Free parking is available. Those unable to attend can watch a live stream here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgQ9mgFZYME.
The forum is intended to allow scholars and community leaders to examine the state of voting rights in North Carolina and to provide cultural and historical context for the hearing.
Panelists include:
- Debo Adegbile, commissioner, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
- Juliana Cabrales, National Association of Latinx Elected Officials
- Richard L. Engstrom, faculty affiliate, Social Science Research Institute at Duke University
- Kerry Haynie, professor, political science, Duke University
- Catherine Lhamon, chair, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
- Theodore M. Shaw, Julius L. Chambers Distinguished Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Civil Rights at the UNC School of Law
The event will be moderated by Mark Anthony Neal, chair of the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke, which is co-sponsoring the forum.
The following day, Feb. 2, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights will hold a day-long public meeting in Raleigh to gather public testimony about voting rights obstacles in for its 2018 report to Congress. The Commission plans to address voting rights enforcement efforts after the 2006 reauthorization of the temporary provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the impact of the Shelby County v. Holder Supreme Court decision. The Commission will also consider enforcement of Sections 2 and 203 of the Voting Right Act, and whether new or enhanced federal protections could expand voting opportunities for all Americans, including those historically underrepresented because of their race, color or minority language group membership.
For more information on the hearing, visit http://www.usccr.gov/press/2018/01-26-Sunshine-Notice.pdf.
POSTPONED: How To Get Nominated For – and Win? – A Grammy
A public conversation with producer 9th Wonder who has been nominated for his work on Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Duckworth’; event postponed until further notice
The Department of African and African American Studies at Duke will host an event celebrating the success of Patrick Douthit, aka 9th Wonder, who is up for two Grammy Awards this year.
The 7 p.m. event, “How To Get Nominated for A Grammy,” is free and open to the public. It will be held in the Friedl Art Gallery in the Ernestine Friedl Building on Duke’s East Campus. Light refreshments will be served.
Douthit, a lecturing fellow in Duke’s African and African-American Studies Department, will discuss the work behind his two recent Grammy nominations. He was previously awarded a Grammy for his work on a Mary J. Blige album in 2015. This year, the Grammy Award committee recognized the prolific producer for his work on Kendrick Lamar’s most recent release, which is up for Album of the Year, and for his contributions to Rapsody’s “Laila’s Wisdom,” which is up for Best Rap Album.
Douthit has worked with many musical celebrities including Jay-Z, Erykah Badu, Beyonce and Destiny’s Child, among others. Last month, as the Grammy nominations were being announced, Douthit dropped a surprise album of beats, Zion II. He has taught at North Carolina Central University, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania as well as Duke. In addition, he is a major contributor to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
The event will also feature “SexyNotSilent,” a visual arts exhibit by self-taught local artist Natasha Powell Walker. An artist talk for the exhibit will be held in the same location the following week, at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 25.
Her work tends to focus on the female figure and the struggles women face in society. Through her use of vibrant color, Walker is able to tackle complex issues and provide a sense of empowerment and enlightenment.
Walker will interview Douthit about the opportunities and challenges in Durham’s rising local arts scene, and what it takes to win a Grammy.
The Grammy Awards will air live on CBS on Jan. 28.
The event is sponsored by the Duke Council on Race and Ethnicity and the Center for Arts, Digital Culture and Entrepreneurship.
Duke Immerse Students Transformed by Immersive Experience
Students in Professors Kerry Haynie and Ralph Lawrence’s fall 2017 Duke Immerse program discuss the life-changing semester they spent traveling to different cities learning about urban governance and structural inequality.
By the year 2050, approximately 7 billion people will be living in cities worldwide. This makes it imperative that we not only think about how best to plan and build urban centers in terms of physical features and infrastructure, but that we also pay attention to how inhabitants interact and coexist in these environments, and how politics and public policy can significantly affect these human interactions.
The Governance, Policy, and Society Duke Immerse program (GPS) is a research-intensive semester-long examination of politics, policymaking, and social interactions in urban settings. GPS uses 3 U.S. cities, Atlanta, New Orleans and Durham, and two cities in South Africa, Durban and Pietermaritzburg, as case studies and sites for student fieldwork. In both the U.S. and South Africa, racial and class divisions and group-based disparities remain prominent features of the urban landscape, despite the formal barriers of segregation having come down, sixty years ago in the U.S., and two-and-a-half decades ago in South Africa. The persistence of these various divisions and disparities has serious implications for community cohesion, race relations, public health, education, and general economic and social development.
Along with these topics, GPS Duke Immerse participants examine issues such as gentrification, urban redevelopment, economic mobility, zoning, public safety enforcement, public-private initiatives, tourism and leisure, and political decision-making. An underlying premise of GPS is that comparative analyses provide an opportunity for expanding knowledge and understanding of patterns of social and economic deprivation. Such analyses also have the potential of suggesting policy reforms and prescriptions that could contribute to more cooperative group relations and enhanced opportunities for all to have a fair chance at significant positive economic mobility.
Here, students in the course discuss their experiences.
What was the most different about this Duke Immerse semester than a “typical” Duke semester?
Tionne Barmer: I think something that’s great is that we have all four classes together and with the same professors so I think you definitely get to know everyone on a personal basis. You get to benefit from that group dynamic, which is really nice because we can all bond over doing the work or traveling or living together when we were in New Orleans or when we were in South Africa, so I think that part was very nice.
Donovan Bendana: I think what’s most unique about this semester is all of us are really interested in the topics and the issues that we’re learning about and it’s not “Oh, I’m taking this class as a requirement” or “I’m not really interested in this, I’m just trying to fill an arts credit” or something like that. But with this program, everyone’s really interested in the topics and really engaged and it pushes me, at least, to learn more and do better in the class.
Kevin Solomon: I also really like how this program is structured on the same theme. Like we looked at the same topics that are all very similar about urban politics, about urban affairs. So as in a regular or typical semester, I would take statistics and English and maybe a political science course — I’d have a very eclectic range of courses. And this program I get to really focus and dive into a topic like gentrification or transportation policy. And that’s really unique and, rather than just getting the broad outlines, you really get to see it and understand it.
For example, I get to see how transportation connects to affordable housing and I get to see how that compares in the United States and in South Africa. Whereas, in another class, if it’s just a regular semester, I might just learn about one topic and then we’ll go to the next topic and not really see the connections and draw comparisons.
Alycia Parker: I think this semester has been a lot different for me because I’m also taking another class with this class in order to keep track with my Arabic major. So it’s been a little difficult for me especially with going on our trips for three whole weeks of the semester. But I think it’s definitely do-able and it has been extremely interesting to be in this group of people and to be able to learn about a theme, and then go into the field and do work. I feel like that’s so much different than the standard class you’d have at Duke. You can learn about these same concepts in class but you wouldn’t necessarily be conducting interviews learning about spacial intake in the same way as seeing it. I think it makes it a lot more real and tangible to what we’re learning.
The four courses in this Duke Immerse program focused on governance, public policy, and social interactions in cities and urban neighborhoods. If someone was to ask you what, if anything, about these topics is of any general societal concern or significance, what would your answer be?
Kyra Exterovich-Rubin: I think I’m still thinking about the last book we just read which was really, really important to me. We just read “Behind the White Picket Fence,”[written by Sarah Mayorga-Gallo, a 2012 Duke sociology alum] talking about the hypocrisy of progressive ideologies and how there’s a hypocrisy between those ideologies and how they manifest in social interactions in terms of racial integration. And I think that’s important right now especially for college campuses where we live in these very literal bubbles and we don’t always feel a personal mandate to enact these values in how we live our lives.
Tionne: I think, for me, I’ve taken a lot of economics classes at Duke and I think just 
generally the amount of inequality that’s present even in the United States has been staggering — and it’s increasing year by year. We’ve seen that very much throughout the course. In looking at some of the things we saw in New Orleans and Atlanta, and to compare those things in a country like South Africa, which has a history of apartheid and gender inequality, we noticed that these two countries are kind of similar and have a lot of connections. It really just places a light behind the fact that there is a lot of inequality here right now on the ground.
The class trips to Atlanta, New Orleans, Pietermaritzburg, and Durban are described as fieldwork trips. How did they relate to the rest of your classes and coursework? How did they contribute or enhance your learning?
Donovan: We would have class for about– maybe more like a field trip — for around 3-4 hours everyday, usually in the morning. And what was great about these trips is that we had a lot of free time in the afternoon. I think Professor Haynie was really adamant about making sure we had time to really explore the cities, both in Atlanta and New Orleans and in South Africa, ourselves and often when we were just alone, that’s when we started to realize things we read about. It was really interesting.
Kyra: In terms of the research we were doing, we looked at websites like Trulia that people actually look at in terms of how they buy homes. There are ratings for crime and educational attainment and those are things that people use to make their everyday decisions about where they want to live. And they will actually analyze those statistics and it’ll kind of be indicators of an impoverished neighborhood.
Erin McDermott: I think we used a lot of the skills we gained through class on the trips. When we were visiting different neighborhoods, we could see how structural inequality, for example, plays out. Each researcher came to these conclusions because we were actually seeing the neighborhood itself. And even that happened a lot in retrospect, where we’ll talk about something in class and be like ‘Oh, we actually noticed that in New Orleans’ or ‘we noticed that in Atlanta’. So it was a unique experience, as far as drawing upon what we learn in class. We actually saw the real-world applications form.
How did you learn about the program?
Donovan: I was actually in another class with Duke political science professor Ashley Jardina — Minorities in American Politics. I really enjoyed it. I actually didn’t apply for the program until very early May. I had already registered for classes, but when I was registering for classes I was trying to find more classes on minority politics. And I wasn’t very successful. But then I stumbled upon Duke Immerse and I saw ‘Wow, four of these are minority politics classes.’ It’s perfect– so I told Spencer and we both applied.
Are there things you learned from these trips that you couldn’t get from reading and audio-visual materials?
Josh Podl: I think for me in particular, we read a lot. The trip to New Orleans was very eye-opening for me because we read a lot about Hurricane Katrina and what’s happened after that and we read a lot about efforts to revitalize New Orleans. But, I don’t think you get the whole picture about what areas are being rebuilt and what areas are being neglected. And we definitely saw that when we were in the 9th Ward. We were in this development neighborhood, in these areas that seem like they really haven’t been touched since Katrina. There’s so many abandoned houses, vegetation that’s just growing like crazy, porches you can still see from the remains of houses, the roads were extremely bumpy. And then we go to more, maybe middle class, or more affluent neighborhoods in New Orleans where everything looks pretty much normal and you would have no clue that a huge natural disaster had hit. So, it’s just crazy. You don’t really get the picture of where the money is going to and who’s really being helped.
Donovan: Even for me, I’m actually from New Orleans. So that was part of the reason why I wanted to take this class. I’ve lived there my whole life and I would think ‘Oh I know about New Orleans and its racial inequality issues,’ but no. Taking this class I was still learning about new aspects of New Orleans that I had never known before.
Even just going to the 9th Ward, I realized that I don’t go to the 9th Ward a lot– I’ve maybe only been there once, I’d just drive by it. And my group is the one that did the presentation on that neighborhood, so really delving into that neighborhood, specifically and learning about it was meaningful for me because I’ve had a very different experience with Katrina than maybe someone in the neighborhood next to me or definitely than someone from the lower 9th Ward. The experiences vary a lot based on socioeconomic experience. I was constantly learning new things about New Orleans…
Just driving through the lower 9th Ward and really seeing how like the roads were just in disarray, driving through a part of my city that looked like it was in an underdeveloped country was almost just staggering like ‘This is my home, this is where I live. And these issues are right at the forefront.’
Spencer Bandeen: On that topic, I think a lot of the neighborhoods that we saw aren’t necessarily the most tourist-y destinations, so I think you could go to New Orleans or Atlanta and you won’t have the same experience that we just did. And in South Africa, we went to Durban and Pietermaritzburg. And most of the time when people go to South Africa, or heard that we were, they’re like ‘Oh, you’re going to Cape Town or Johannesburg’. But what we were seeing was more authentic to what we’ve been learning and I think it’s more applicable.
Kyra: We read a book earlier this semester called “Evicted” which is about homelessness in Wisconsin and I’m from Wisconsin. Reading that just kind of shook me because race is not discussed in Wisconsin. Everyone has a very ‘we don’t see color’ attitude about it.
I had never really been passionate about housing as a policy issue. I’m a public policy and philosophy major and so I really care about people being able to achieve upward mobility. It’s crazy how it never really hit home for me. I never had to consider that personally. And I think driving through and just seeing boarded up windows and overgrown lawns and it’s just seeing how inaccessible it is for people to live their day-to-day lives was really striking for me and made me reconsider what is now being discussed back in my home town, my home state.
Kevin: One thing that I think is amazing about this program is that it really just pushed me to think more critically and to challenge my understandings of other cities too, not just Atlanta and New Orleans. But it makes me want to try to have a more wholesome and nuanced understanding and picture of other cities. When I go home for the break in St. Petersburg, Florida or when I go to Grand Rapids, Michigan or Chicago, Illinois the same lessons and the same way that we looked at New Orleans, Atlanta, Pietermaritzburg, Durban; I have used that lens to view other cities. I don’t just look at the romanticized part or the beautiful tourist attractions, I look at the good and the bad, too.
Now that you’ve had this experience, what are some of the questions you ask yourself when visiting new cities?
Kevin: For instance, one of things I ask is: Downtown is where everybody seems to be, it’s where all the activity is, it’s where the entertainment is, where the economic employment opportunities are– but what about somebody who lives five miles out? Is there a place that they can go? Or do they have to come all the way downtown every time? And so just asking ‘why do people occupy these places and how does that affect their interactions and experiences?’ is definitely something that this program has encouraged me to think about.
Spencer: One of the things I learned, especially when we visited New Orleans and Atlanta, is just how very unique the history of race relations in America is and how it still plays out today and how desegregation still hasn’t occurred. And I think as the public image of America is so different than what we’ve been learning about and how the issues really are. In a sense, this was eye opening because a lot of what we’re doing is pertaining to current events– I mean they’re happening. We were looking, in the beginning of this year, at how some of these statues are being taken down, the riots surrounding the protests in Charlottesville. It seems very relevant to be taking the course, especially this semester.
Kevin: I think another really cool aspect to the program is that not only do we get to understand the United States and South Africa, but the lessons that we learned are intended to be extended beyond to other countries too. Just generally we learned about inequality and what shapes inequality and how everybody spirals and how it’s intertwined and just how difficult it is to try to overcome obstacles. And I think that that is a universal reality, that’s not something that’s just true in the United States and South Africa. So if I study abroad next year and I’m in Europe, or I was in Ecuador last summer– like a lot of the same things that I saw in Ecuador are also true here and will be true if I study abroad somewhere else.
Do you think the Duke immerse experience will have any lasting effects on the rest of your Duke academic career, and what you will do after Duke? If so, how or in what ways?
Kevin: I think one of the biggest impacts that this had on me for my college career is that I was considering whether or not I wanted to work or do an internship over the summer that’s in the United States, or if I was going to try to go abroad and get university funding. And I think one thing I would say is that this program really opened up my eyes to see that there are real problems here in the United States and we’re addressing it in a manner where they can be very much overlooked. And I think this program really made it feel more important or urgent to be doing work here in the United States, even though there are so many problems that are going on elsewhere.
Donovan: I’m an International and Comparative Studies major and this course has changed my plan– I was going to concentrate in Europe but this course has changed me to concentrate in Africa because of our experiences in South Africa.
Kevin: I am now doing a minor in African and African American Studies that I wouldn’t have done otherwise.
Tionne: I’m a senior so [my plans haven’t changed or anything like that] realistically. The thing for me– and this is kind of cheesy and I’m not really that type of person – but when we were in South Africa I remember this particular experience: we were in one of the local neighborhoods talking to one of the guys who was giving the tour, he was a pastor in that neighborhood, and he was talking about the violence and the poverty and the trauma, the general lack of economic mobility that the community faced.
And we read about these things in school, you know, we read about them in the papers, and it’s all good and then we go back to our dorms, we go back to our $70,000/yr school.
I think, when we went to that community, it was a very emotional experience for me and one that I’ll remember just because he talked about how, even after all the things they faced, after their family members were killed and all these things, they were still able to rebuild everything they had and just build up from the ground up. And you can see how they just kind of started off just having mud homes– people were trying to build their homes until they were actual real structures. I think that is just something I carried with me. Even when I’m thinking about ‘Oh I can’t do this’ or something, there’s people who are building from the ground up.
Kyra: Going off of that, when we went to a village– that experience was one of my favorites and I think one of the most meaningful to me on the whole trip. We sat in on this women’s self-help group for coming together to build small businesses and sell their crafts so that they can then learn the financial skills of investing and banking and things like that. And they were so grateful and happy and joyful and had this community that was so strong and colorful and that stood in such stark contrast with the gated community in Pietermaritzburg that was so wealthy and so sterile. As a community they would, I think every Monday, collectively would put in the amount which was like 20 Rand and it was like 15 women and that was all they could use and they were so happy and so optimistic.
Spencer: Two things. One of them is: Immediately following our trip, I stayed with a friend who lived in a gated community in South Carolina and having learned on the concept of private facilities and what individuals who live in gated communities can really change my perspective of them to really see how that plays out, concepts like neighborhood watch, and other things that I could then see in person. And just going off what Kyra said, we witnessed this microfinance group and, immediately after coming back from South Africa, I applied to a DukeEngage that does microfinance in India that I’ll be doing that this summer.
Alycia: When we were leaving, Kyra had left her backpack in the house and they just like came running with the backpack and I was like ‘Wow, they could have like kept this’ like they had no obligation to return it but the woman came running and I think that really just sticks with me. Welcoming us into the community, they didn’t have to do that.
Governance, Policy, and Society is led by Professors Kerry Haynie and Ralph Lawrence. For more information on this program visit: http://dukeimmersegovpolicysociety.strikingly.com.
This story also appeared on Duke Today.
Book Talk: The Politics of Blackness in Brazil
Gladys Mitchell-Walthour is a political scientist specializing in Brazilian racial politics. Her work examines Afro-Brazilian racial identification, discrimination, political behavior and opinion.
She will discuss her latest book, “The Politics of Blackness: Racial Identity and Political Behavior in Contemporary Brazil” (Cambridge University Press), on Wednesday, Nov. 29th at noon in 225 Friedl on Duke’s East Campus.
Mitchell-Walthour, an assistant professor of public policy and political economy in the Department of Africology at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, uses an intersectional approach to analyze the impact of the experience of race on Afro-Brazilian political behavior in the cities of Salvador, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro. Taking into account the experience of racial discrimination, she seeks to explain Afro-Brazilian political behavior with a focus on affirmative action policy and Law 10.639 (requiring that African and Afro-Brazilian history be taught in schools).
Mitchell-Walthour has also co-authored two edited volumes as well as the book, Brazil’s New Racial Politics (2010), with Bernd Reiter. She has published articles in Racial and Ethnic Studies (2010), The National Political Science Review (2011), and Latin American Politics and Society (2009) among others.
Mitchell-Walthour holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago, a master of public policy from the University of Michigan, and a B.A. in political science and African & African-American Studies from Duke University. In addition, she was a visiting research fellow at Duke’s Social Science Research Institute (SSRI), and a Samuel DuBois Cook Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Gender in the Social Sciences (REGSS) at Duke.
Seeing Our Way Free
By Wesley Hogan
New ways of looking at the world never fail to create within me feelings of both excitement and awkwardness, like learning a new dance step. When I became director of Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) in 2013, my training was an oral historian, so I asked my colleagues for advice on how to look at photography and film. Many generous and brilliant people expanded my understanding but none more than Courtney Reid-Eaton, CDS’s exhibitions director.
Recently, the richness of her knowledge enveloped me again as I listened to her curator’s talk and panel for the extraordinary exhibit, En | Gender, now on view at Cassilhaus. The show is part of the Triangle’s annual CLICK photography festival, which continues to develop as one of the most exciting gatherings around photographic work in the country.
“I had the good fortune to be invited to Curator Camp at Cassilhaus last summer,” Reid-Eaton began. “A lovely gathering of museum and gallery professionals from around the South. We began with conversations about upcoming projects, interests, and concerns, and when my turn came I asked, ‘Why am I the only person of color here?’ That’s a problem.”
Indeed, who is at the storytelling table is at the heart of documentary, journalism, and the arts nationwide. Most of the people who have trained as photographers, filmmakers, oral historians, and other nonfiction storytellers over the last five or six generations have been overwhelmingly white. For Reid-Eaton, this was true as she began her career: “I think of my photographic influences, especially in documentary, and they’re mostly white; my mentors and teachers were white. That had an impact on my aesthetic and the ways I learned to see. I realize on reflection, that there are things that I make that white people respond to and there are other things that I’ve felt really strongly about that they seem unable to read or connect with or that they exoticize.”
What impact does this have on developing artists who are people of color, or women, or LGBTQI?, she asked. She described how exploring that question became ever more important to her as she recognized that “most gatekeepers in the arts, people with jobs like mine, who select which artists and work to promote and support, are white.”
Reid-Eaton’s remarks got me curious: How do we learn to see, to read, the work by some artists, even as we find others incomprehensible, illegible? She explained that during her first decade at CDS, she “focused on the institution; showed the kind of work our mostly white audience responded positively and comfortably to.” Then her curatorial practice took a distinctly new turn.
“I decided I wanted to spend my second decade centering the work of people of color and women—my communities—by holding and supporting access to places/spaces like CDS and Cassilhaus; encouraging folks from my communities to take on gatekeeper jobs/roles, to create access for others.” She invited in new audiences, gathered local artists from the African diaspora at CDS, and expanded the range of her curatorial practice through innovative shows like “The Self Care Exhibit: A Word and Image Act of Self Preservation and Political Warfare” and “The Jemima Code.”
En | Gender emerges as another example of the nourishing fruit of Reid-Eaton’s intellectual labor. Here she brings together the work of three gender-nonconforming artists of color: Gabriel García Román, Saba Taj, and Lola Flash. “To bring the work of these artists together to be in conversation, to call in our communities, is a joy and a privilege,” Reid-Eaton notes in the gallery guide.
Invoking Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois’s focus on representation, she recognizes that “people of color, Muslims, women—people who have been identified by dominant American culture as minority, marginalized, other—don’t wear those labels in the wider world. We are, in fact, the majority of the world’s population. Our intellectual and cultural contributions, Spiritual practices, and the unpaid, invisible labor of home and family making/sustaining—the stuff that keeps the human race alive and growing—are undervalued, except when drawn on to entertain, enrich, and inspire the ‘powerful.’ But we know who we are. Artists and scholars like the three whose work is included in this exhibition, are working in a tradition that has existed much longer than the camera. Portrait, image, art; vehicles for collaboration and self-determination; opportunities for immortality.”
Cassilhaus has an enviable reputation for bringing thought-provoking artists forward, and Reid-Eaton’s virtuosity opened a space for those present at Cassilhaus to broaden understandings and legitimize the ways people choose to see and present themselves and their communities in documentary. She asked García Román and Taj to share some of their early influences. Who impacted how they saw the world?
Taj noted that her mother could make anything: drapes, delicious cuisine, clothing. She even “sculpted the hell out of the hedges.” Taj grew up in a majority white school where both family and school culture advocated assimilation. She identifies as a queer Muslim femme, and part of her early motivation was to express the beauty and diversity of Muslim and South Asian culture in a North Carolina where people held static stereotypes of both, particularly in the wake of 9/11.
García Román’s early influences included Jan van Eyck, and as he developed his work, he grew fascinated by texture; he wanted his subjects to be able to talk back to their portraits by allowing them to add their own words. “From the queer Latina fighting for immigration rights to the non-binary disabled Trans Filipino,” García Román writes, his sitters are “heroes in their own right.” Both Taj and García Roman explored how their early influences shaped their art, and how they began to create new expressions to better represent their own experiences and communities. Taj’s work presents a broad range of Muslim women’s experiences and emotions; García Román has focused on self-determination. Lola Flash makes disarming, complex portraits of gender non-conforming trailblazers such as Cheryl Dunye and DJ Formika. Reid-Eaton moves with these “outsiders” from margin to center, as figures that García Román notes are “inherently worthy of attention, emulation, and storytelling.”
One hundred and fifty-six years have passed since Frederick Douglass’s first “Lecture on Pictures” in 1861. Yet artist Coco Fusco recently observed that today, elite art schools avoid revising curricula and modes of critique that incorporate critical race theory or the history of anti-racist cultural production. Without that formative training, curators and artists lack a common ground for informed discussion about power and representation. I’m grateful, enormously so, that I work alongside a curator who fosters that informed discussion day in and day out and helps me to learn to see and engage in more authentic dialogues with people who’ve lived lives that may be different than mine.
“We know none of us are not free until we are all Free,” writes Reid-Eaton. Go see En | Gender—it’s on view until December 3—and imagine what your freedom will look like.
Wesley Hogan is the director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, where she teaches the history of youth social movements, African American history, women’s history, and oral history. She is a research professor at the university’s Franklin Humanities Institute and Department of History. Hogan’s book on SNCC, Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC’s Dream for a New America (2007), won the Lillian Smith Book Award, among other honors, and she is currently working on a post-1960s history of young people organizing in the spirit of Ella Baker.
