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Where Did the Hammond Sound Come From – and Where Did It Go?
Ashon Crawley lecture begins AAAS 50th speaker series
Ashon Crawley, Ph.D.‘13, grew up in the Black Pentecostal church playing the Hammond organ by ear. He thought it was a sound that belonged to the black church. In fact, the sound of the organ can be traced from pre-slave trade Islam to southern delta gospel and blues.
His late afternoon talk, “Migration Stories and the Hammond Sound,” explored how the sound of the Hammond organ has crossed continents and time as a sonic device regarded for its mystical and spiritual significance.
“There is sonic evidence in the way we pray. If we listen to the sound of Islam, we might hear the relationship to the blues,” Crawley said before playing surprisingly similar-sounding clips of music from the Islamic, blues, Black Baptist and Black Pentecostal traditions.
Nearly 30 students and faculty from Duke and neighboring universities filled the Moyle Room at the Karsh Alumni and Visitor Center on Sept. 18, for the launch of the Department of African and African American Studies’ 50th anniversary speaker series. The 2019/20 series features a lecture by Duke alum who was trained or mentored in black studies at Duke and went on to a career in the field.
Crawley is an associate professor of religious studies and African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. He is also the author or “Black Pentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility,” and the forthcoming, “The Lonely Letters.”
“Migration is an attempt to allow for creative practice in the unfamiliar. We can understand the journey by the cities traveled through. Migration is a cause of remembrance. What do we carry when we migrate?” Crawley said.
“Let’s take it to church,” Crawley said, a common refrain, means “there is something worth carrying.”
He notes the moment when a musician changes the sound from major to minor, heightening the audience expectation.
“These are occasions to think about the interrelatedness of sacred practice,” Crawley said.
He listened to musicians play the same song on the Hammond and how the chords changed in cities such as Brooklyn, Detroit, Houston and Chicago, the location of churches known for their musicianship.
“They are actually playing what it feels like to be a question,” Crawley said. “The chord changes mark difference, what is it like to live and breathe in difference?”
Of the musicians, often queer people “who serve as a sonic foundation” for the church, Crawley said “the church does not want them to come out nor do they want to risk losing their labor so they don’t talk about queerness, unless it is in a disparaging way.”
With more stringent church rules that did not allow for experimentation and the decline of music education in public school, Crawley’s work traces the sacred sound of the organ as it “creates new worlds.”
AAAS Speaker Series Highlights Duke Black Studies Alum
On Wednesday afternoon the Department of African & African American Studies will launch its 50th anniversary speaker series with Duke alum Ashon Crawley.
Crawley, Ph.D., ‘13, will deliver a talk, “Migration Stories and the Hammond Sound,” at 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 18 in the Moyle Room of the newly opened Karsh Alumni and Visitor’s Center (2080 Duke University Rd., Durham).
The talk is free and open to the public. Free parking is available across the street in the gravel lot. A reception will follow the talk.
Each month, the department will host a lecture by scholars who have been immersed in black studies at Duke. All of the talks will be held at 4:30 p.m. in the Karsh Center.
“The series is an opportunity to acknowledge the impact of Black Studies on the Duke University campus, and there’s no better way to do that than to highlight the fine scholars whose research was directed by current and former members of AAAS faculty, said Mark Anthony Neal, the James B. Duke Professor of African & African American Studies and chair of the department. “The scholars presenting in the series have emerged as some of the leading voices in the field of Black Diaspora Studies.”
Crawley, who earned a Ph.D. in English and a certificate in African & African American Studies at Duke, is an associate professor of Religious Studies and African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia, is the author of “Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility.”
He is also author of the forthcoming, “The Lonely Letters,” described as an exploration of the interrelation of blackness, mysticism, quantum mechanics and love.
Next month, on Oct. 14, Courtney R. Baker, Ph.D. ‘08, an associate professor of English at the University of California, Riverside will give a talk, “Black Humanity, Visible Violence, and Liberation Aesthetics.”
For more information on the Department of African & African American Studies, visit aaas.duke.edu.
AAAS 50th Anniversary Speaker Series
Oct. 14 Courtney R. Baker, Ph.D. ‘08, University of California, Riverside
Nov. 11 Patrick Alexander, Ph.D. ‘12, University of Mississippi
Dec. 4 Kinohi Nishikawa, Ph.D. ‘10, Princeton University
Jan. 30 Candis Watts Smith, Ph.D. ‘11, Penn State
Feb. 27 Candice Jenkins, WSTC ‘01, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
TBA Danny Hoffman, Ph.D. ‘04, University of Washington
Duke’s Black Comedy Class Brings ‘Upper Ghetto Godmother,’ Sept. 19
By Camille Jackson
Next Thursday, Sept. 19, comedienne, actress and self-dubbed “upper ghetto godmother,” Marsha Warfield, perhaps best known for her wise-cracking bailiff ‘80s-sitcom character, Roz, on NBC’s “Night Court,” will visit Duke University.
Warfield is a special guest for the Duke University course “Dick Gregory and the History of Black Comedy” course, taught by Professor Mark Anthony Neal, the James B. Duke Professor of African & African American Studies. The course features guest appearances by professional comedians, critics and screenings of rare and/or classic films.
The 6:15 p.m.-7:30 p.m. class is free and open to the public on Thursdays where it is held at the NorthStar Church of the Arts, a converted church founded by Nnenna and Phil Freelon that serves as “a sacred space for healing, creative expression and spiritual connectivity.”
Registration is not necessary but RSVPs are requested: tinyurl.com/DukeMarshaWarfield.
Warfield lives and works in Las Vegas where she performs her show, The Marsha Warfield Experience, at L.A. Comedy Club at the Stratosphere Casino & Hotel. She describes herself as “a loving godmother, an opinionated feminist, an out and proud Black lesbian and a talented actress,” she brings these attributes to her one-woman show. After an overlong period of retirement, Warfield now tackles issues including politics, blackness, coming out as a gay woman and her affair with pizza.
Warfield is best known for “Night Court,” but she also starred in “Empty Nest” as Dr. Maxine Douglas, and as a performer on “The Richard Pryor Show.” She has appeared on shows such as “Soul Train,” “The Arsenio Hall Show,” “The Tonight Show,” and her own talk show, “The Marsha Warfield Show.”
Other guests are:
Oct. 10
Bassey Ikpi is the author of the New York Times bestseller, “I’m Telling the Truth but I’m Lying.” An active voice in pop culture commentary and the mental health community, Ikpi’s essays have been published by The Root, Ebony, Huffington Post and Essence. She was also the resident pop culture critic for Philly’s WURD FM radio station and is currently a contributing editor for Catapult. A poet, she has been featured on HBO’s ‘Def Poetry Jam.’ Ikpi is the founder of The Siwe Project, a mental health organization, and the creator of #NoShameDay, an initiative that attempts to reduce stigma and create space for neurodivergent people to be heard and seen through their own personal stories.
Oct. 24
These days comedienne and actress Kim Coles, best known as “Synclaire” on the FOX comedy series “Living Single, is using comedy to inspire and empower others through a series of designed programs. “Pulling from her experiences, research and years in the entertainment business,” Coles hosts workshops and group sessions related to topics such as using your gifts, “walking in purpose,” and “sharing the power of your story.” She has made appearances on Oprah, The Dr. Oz Show, and at the annual Essence Music Festival in New Orleans.
Nov. 21
Mel Watkins is an author and former editor, writer, and critic for the New York Times Sunday Book Review. Since 2007, he has been the NEH Professor of the Humanities at Colgate University where he has taught courses on literature and African American studies. His books include On the Real Side: A History of African American Comedy, Dancing With Strangers, and Stepin Fetchit: The Life and Times of Lincoln Perry. His articles and reviews have appeared in numerous national magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, and he has frequently appeared as a commentator on televised documentaries about American culture and humor.
ABOUT THE COURSE
AAAS 331: Black Popular Culture
Dick Gregory and the History of Black Comedy
At the peak of his fame in the 1960s, Dick Gregory may have been the most influential comedian in America, offering truths about race, the Black community and politics in an era highlighted by the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement. “Dick Gregory and the History of Black Comedy” will examine the roots of the Black comedic tradition that informed Gregory’s art and activism, with a particular focus, in the spirit of Mr. Gregory, on the ways in which Black comedy has been used in the quest for civil and human rights.
The course will also highlight the role of Black literary satire, including the work of George Schuyler and Ollie Harrington, as well as contemporary examples such as novelists Danzy Senna, Kiese Laymon, Paul Beatty, and Fran Ross, cartoonist Aaron McGruder, comedians Issa Rae, Dave Chappelle, Wanda Sykes, Chris Rock and, even critical race theorist and legal scholar Derrick Bell.
The course is taught with the support of Dr. Christian C. Gregory, executor of the Estate
of Dick Gregory and the Estate of Jenny Lillian Semans Koortbojian.
Classic Black Comedy Films
August 29 Ethnic Notions (dir. Marlon Riggs, 1987)
September 5 Putney Swope (dir. Robert Downey, Sr., 1969)
September 12 Bamboozled (dir. Spike Lee, 2001)
September 26 Watermelon Man (dir. Melvin Van Peebles, 1970)
October 3 Sweet Love, Bitter (dir. Herbert Danska, 1967)
November 7 Blue Collar (dir. Paul Schrader, 1978)
November 14 Whoopi Goldberg Presents Moms Mabley (dir. Goldberg, 2013)
December 5 Hollywood Shuffle (dir. Robert Townsend, 1987)
1969 Allen Building Takeover Alumni Reunite on 50th Anniversary
Nearly two dozen of the protesters met with administrators then told their stories to a sold-out audience
The 1969 Allen Building Takeover has loomed large in Duke’s history. This past weekend, Feb. 9-10, nearly two dozen of the Duke alums who protested returned to campus to check on the status of the demands they issued 50 years ago and to see the impact of their activism.
The sold-out event, “Commemorating the Allen Building Takeover: Fifty Years Later,” was hosted by the Department of African & African American Studies (AAAS) and held in the Ambassador Ballroom at the Washington Duke Inn. Two panel discussions, “The Original Protesters Tell Their Stories,” and “Activism Then and Now: An Intergenerational Discussion,” were followed by a reception at the Nasher Museum of Art. Hundreds attended and watched via livestream.
On Saturday morning, the black Duke alumni who participated in the Allen Building Takeover were invited to a private brunch with President Vincent Price. Price acknowledged their role in challenging Duke to become more inclusive and diverse.
“In the action that you took, you forever shifted our sails towards the prevailing winds of justice and equality,” Price said.
“I don’t quite know how to say thank you enough for what you did 50 years ago,” Valerie Ashby, dean of Trinity College of Arts & Sciences, told the alum in her introductory remarks during Saturday’s main program, adding that her role on campus would not exist had it not been for the takeover.
“So something happens differently for me when I walk in the Allen Building,” she said, describing the portrait of Julian Abele, the black architect who designed Duke’s campus. “Then I go into my office … which is right outside of where you did your work, I am not confused about how I am able to walk into that office each day. I owe you a huge debt of gratitude. Our job is to make you proud. Our job is to continue to help the university move forward so nothing that you did would have been done in vain.”
Ashby joined Mark Anthony Neal, chair of AAAS, and Qsanet Tekie, ’19, president of the Duke Eritrean and Ethiopian Student Transnational Association, to welcome “the Originals” and provide historical context for their activism 50 years ago. On Sunday, the Duke alumni had an informal Sunday service with remarks by Rev. Bill Turner, ’71, and previewed an exhibit on the takeover in Perkins Library.
Many of “the Originals” had attended rural, segregated schools. They had been hand-picked by their communities — as national merit scholars and academically gifted — to attend Duke not long after the university integrated in 1963.
The impetus for the Takeover came when fall semester grades were released.
“I had black people coming up to me who had never come to any meetings or who had never spoken to me, come to me and said, ‘Chuck we have to do something, these grades are not fair.’ They had stories of [the racism] they had experienced in class,” said Chuck Hopkins, ’69, co-founder of the Afro-American Society.
On Feb. 13, 1969, Hopkins and dozens of other black Duke students barricaded themselves inside of the Allen Building, presenting the university administration with a list of demands, an action that has become a model for student activism on campus over the years.
The takeover resulted in the hiring of more black faculty, the creation of a black studies program which would eventually become AAAS, and a black student union that is now the Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture.
All agreed it took courage and commitment to go into the building.
“I was concerned we might die, especially if we brought guns,” Michael McBride, ’71, said. At other colleges and universities, students were being shot and killed for protesting.
“One of the things we strategized in our meetings was that we weren’t going to bring arms or touch anyone. Our whole thing was let’s not give the administration a reason to focus on something else,” Hopkins said.
“Once we decided to do that I called Mark Pinsky, ’69, at the (Duke) Chronicle to make sure the national press would cover it. We didn’t want to be an isolated event down here in Durham,” he said. “Howard (Fuller) came later in the day.”
Fuller, who at the time of the takeover was a local community activist in Durham, mentored the Duke students and later became co-founder of Malcolm X Liberation University, where some of them enrolled after leaving Duke that spring.
In the aftermath, the students were put on probation, some were arrested, and some left Duke altogether, never to return.
“We figured the university would not suspend all black students. As part of our trial strategy, we had them sign a document saying they had gone into the building, even when they hadn’t,” Becton, JD ’69, said. “It was not just the students, but the future of Duke that was on trial.”
“It’s easy to talk about now, but it wasn’t easy on that day. We could have been killed. That is not a statement in the abstract,” Fuller said. “When we went into that building in 1969, we were extending the lines of hope and organization. We took our people’s history and suffering into that building.”
VIEW COVERAGE INCLUDING PHOTOS HERE
Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Allen Building Takeover
This Saturday, Feb. 9, Duke University will grapple with a portion of its racial history, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of a pivotal occasion that forced the university to eventually evolve to offer one of the top-ranked black studies programs in the country.
The story of the Feb. 13, 1969, “takeover” of the Allen Building, a surreal moment when tear gas covered the quad, only hastily captured in blurry black and white photos, has been passed down through generations of student activists.
In response to pervasive discrimination, a group of 60-75 black students organized and barricaded themselves inside the university’s main administrative building, issuing a typed list of 12 demands. At the top of the list, they wrote– “we want the establishment of a fully accredited department of Afro-American studies.”
Now, on the anniversary of their activism, the Department of African & African American Studies at Duke for which they paved the way, has invited those black student activists back to campus to acknowledge their sacrifice and contribution to the university.
The group will reunite this weekend for “Commemorating the 1969 Allen Building Takeover: Fifty Years Later,” an event hosted by the department.
The 12:30 p.m. program will be held in the Ambassador Ballroom at the Washington Duke Inn and includes two panel discussions: “The Original Allen Building Takeover Protesters Tell Their Stories,” followed by “Activism Then and Now: An Intergenerational Conversation.”
[NOTE: The event is at capacity. Attendees already registered are encouraged to arrive early as seating is limited. Late attendees will be directed to overflow seating at the Nasher Museum of Art or the Rubenstein Arts Center. At the end of the program, attendees will be shuttled to a reception at the Nasher Museum of Art for where a live DJ playing music from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Free parking is available for all of the day’s events. A free shuttle will transport attendees back and forth between the two venues during the afternoon and early evening.]
To see the full schedule and available parking, go to https://aaas.duke.edu/abt50. Those unable to attend can watch a YouTube live stream and follow the discussion on Twitter @dukeaaas or by searching hashtag #DukeABT50.
Nearly 30 of the original Allen Building Takeover participants are expected to return to Durham, many of whom have not seen each other for 50 years. They have mixed feelings about their experience at Duke and are pleased to know about the impact of their activism.
“Fifty years later, it brings me great joy to know that the same institution which called in the police and National Guard on us in 1969, would today, welcome us back and acknowledge that our actions contributed positively to the evolution of the university,” said Catherine LeBlanc ’71, a business/education consultant, who was among the fifth class of black students to enter Duke.
LeBlanc will moderate a panel of fellow participants sharing first-hand accounts. A second panel will feature Duke alumni from several generations, including the recent 2016 Takeover, as well as former local/community activist Howard Fuller who mentored the Takeover participants.
“Six years after the first cohort of Black Students entered Duke in 1963, Blacks students and their allies were willing to put their academic careers and professional futures on the line, to push the university into the future,” said Mark Anthony Neal, professor and chair of the Department of African and African American Studies.
“The sacrifice of those students, including the trauma and anger they may have carried with them from participating in The Takeover, has helped create the Duke that we know today – not quite where it needs to be, but a far cry from what it was,” he said.
For more information on the Allen Building Takeover, visit Guide to the Allen Building Takeover Collection, 1969-2002 or listen to recordings of student radio station broadcasts from February 13, 1969.
OTHER ALLEN BUILDING TAKEOVER 50TH ANNIVERSARY EVENTS
The Allen Building Takeover marks the moment that Duke as an institution began to grapple with what it means to be an inclusive community, said Duke University Archivist Valerie Gillispie. “The alumni who participated in the Takeover did so at significant personal risk in order to bring attention to the struggles of African American students,” she said.
Last summer Gillispie organized a team of undergraduate students to curate an exhibit, “Black Students Matter: Taking Over Allen in ’69,” set to open on Feb. 13 in Perkins Library, Chappell Family Gallery. The event, free and open to the public, will begin at 4:30 p.m. Duke undergraduates, Lexi Kadis, Alan Ko, and Zara Porter, under the mentorship of a Duke graduate student, Ellen Song drew from a number of collections held by the University Archives to curate the exhibit.
“It was important to me that the exhibit resonate with today’s student body, and that it draw connections between the issues of 1969 and the concerns faced by today’s students of color,” Gillispie said. “The exhibit is a chance for the entire campus to reflect on the events of February 13, 1969 and the ways it impacted the fifty years that have followed.”
At 6:30 p.m. on the same evening, “Students Demand Change: The Genesis of the Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture,” also free and open to the public, will be held at the in the Flowers Building in The Underground room. [Space is limited]
“It will be a reflective conversation,” said Chandra Guinn, MLWC director. “Through dialogue, we will consider how student activism and students’ demands called for and became the catalyst for institutional change.”
Attendees will reflect on student activism throughout the years and the conditions that gave rise to the Allen Building Takeover with a focus on “what work is left to do.”
“It is important to take time to reflect on how far we have come and what is left to do to help make the campus community one where all feel welcome and supported. It is because students demand change that institutions are made better,” Guinn said.
For more information, contact the Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture.
Black Studies All Up In Your Classroom: Students Create Online Curriculum
Find the stories. Make lesson plans. Put it online.
That’s what a team of students working for the weekly webcast Left of Black was tasked with this summer, but it wasn’t so simple. The webcast showcasing scholars, artists, musicians, just completed its 8th season. That meant there were nearly 250 videos and guest interviews to sort through, many of which hadn’t been in circulation since they first aired years ago.
With funding from Story+, a 6-week summer research program in the Franklin Humanities Institute (FHI), the students, two graduate and two undergraduate, set out to accomplish the mission. Using their respective skills of creating lesson plans, video editing, website building and some acquired new skills, they found interesting stories in the Left of Black archive and turned them into online teaching modules for middle- and high-school students.
The enrichment modules include a video clip derived from a Left of Black episode, a lesson plan and a “digital student experience,” as well as supplemental reading. The Story+ Left of Black team exceeded their initial goal of creating two modules — the team was able to produce four — and made their final presentation at a FHI research symposium on Wednesday, June 27 at Smith Warehouse.
The themes covered in the modules are: service and citizenship, the cultural significance of Black barbershops, the role of music in the Black Power Movement, and Black armed resistance. Each module includes discussion questions, timelines, vocabulary and further reading and is in alignment with the state’s common core standards. The digital experiences and lesson plans can be accessed online here: https://sites.duke.edu/leftofblackenrichment.
Duke undergraduates Ce’Ondra Ellison and Malcolm Brown had both taken classes in Duke’s Department of African & African American Studies and were passionate about what themes and characters they might find.
“This information is so lacking,” said Ellison, an African-American Studies major from High Point, N.C. “I am hoping this work will have long-lasting impact on education.”
Brown was enthusiastic about the project, and quickly grasped the technical aspects of the project like animating a grandmother for a video clip about Black armed resistance.
Graduate students Allison Raven and Nicole Higgins each had prior experience teaching in classrooms and creating lesson plans.
The Story+ experience “allowed me to stay connected to work I had been doing before with high school teachers, which is easy to lose in academia,” Higgins said.
Raven agreed.
“I think we have been extraordinarily lucky with our team. None of us knew each other before beginning the project. For something that relies so heavily on teamwork, this could have gone really badly, but we all balance each other really well and work well together. And I loved the collaborative aspect,” Raven said.
As a team, Raven said they gained a deeper understanding of how to tell stories in the digital age and which tools to use, including social media. The team won FHI’s Story+ Instagram challenge.
FHI’s Chris Chia, Amanda Starling Gould, and Eric Barstow, provided infrastructure and guidance as the Left of Black team delved into the archive and selected a WordPress template on which to build the website.
Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal, who is also the chair of African & African American Studies at Duke, helped the students select four episodes in which to focus their efforts:
- Quincy T. Mills, a history professor at Vassar College and author of “Cutting Along the Color Line: Black Barbers and Barber Shops in America”;
- Chad L. Williams, chair of the African American Studies Department at Brandeis who wrote, “Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the WWI Era”;
- Ricky Vincent, author of “Party Music: The Inside Story of the Black Panthers’ Band and How Black Power Transformed Soul Music”; and
- Akinyele Umoja, an associate professor of African-American Studies at Georgia State who wrote, “We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement.”
The students took excerpts of these videos and used graphics and animations to produce enrichment videos like this one:
First started in 2010, Left of Black is now entering its 9th season. Neal has interviewed a number of notable scholars over the years including Carrie Mae Weems, Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson, Marc Lamont Hill and Melissa Harris Perry. There are plans to continue building the Left of Black curriculum and digital platform.
“It has reinvigorated the project for me,” Neal said. “It’s something we had envisioned from earliest days of Left of Black and we were thrilled to have a team of students to help us realize that vision. It serves as model for what integrated learning could look like, not just at Duke but in the production of scholarship for a broader audience.”
Co-Creating Knowledge: An Intellectual Reunion of Duke Alumnae
More than 50 people gathered in the Ahmadieh Family Conference Room on Tuesday evening, April 24, for a special meeting of Duke’s Introduction to African & African American Studies class, taught this spring by department chair Mark Anthony Neal.
Professors Britt Rusert, Treva Lindsey, Alisha Gaines and Bianca Williams are Duke Ph.D.’s who each had a book on blackness published in the past year. Neal made those books assigned reading for the spring class and invited the alumnae back to campus to speak with students and to revisit their formative years where the seeds for their intellectual pursuits were planted.
The symposium, “Black Women, Black Studies, Knowledge Production,” was entirely curated by graduate and undergraduate students in a demonstration of vertical learning. English Ph.D. student and teaching assistant Israel Durham designed the program for the 2.5 hour symposium, allowing each student an opportunity to converse with the authors.
The students, divided into small groups, passed a microphone and peppered each alumna with thoughtful questions related to their research as well as their scholarly approach and process. View Photos
Wearing a “#CiteBlackWomen” t-shirt, Williams told students that what they were experiencing was special and a testament to the “brilliant teaching” at Duke.
“You get to co-create. You also know things. You have useful questions. You know enough to engage scholars,” she told students.
“I just want you to know this isn’t normal. This doesn’t usually happen,” Williams said, noting the generosity of professors like Neal and Wahneema Lubiano, an associate professor and mentor to the women, who also attended and joined the women for the last panel of the evening.
“Wahneema would write down every foolish thing we said,” Williams remembered of her time as a student. “It might not have been what I said, but [she knew] what I meant. She would take our nugget, add to it, and give it back… That is generosity and it’s not the norm. After being in other environments, I want you to know this is a gift that we all received.”
Lindsey agreed, reminiscing about the familial kinship she felt in her cohort and with the faculty.
“The faculty believed in us as knowledge producers,” Lindsey said. “I wouldn’t have made it without Wahneema and MAN because of the confidence they instilled in us to be voices, but also to be on the front lines when things went down here,” Lindsey said. “That is the type of faculty member I want to be.”
Gaines, who is interested in black popular culture and reality television, said Black women gave her a way to imagine herself as a scholar and a thinker, especially as an undergraduate student at Spelman.
“I’m a good teacher because I have had good models for it,” Gaines said.
Rusert remembers the freedom to be intellectually adventurous while she was a student at Duke.
“I was 22 years old and remember being in that class (The Post-Black Aesthetic). MAN took our ideas seriously. I remember being like ‘wow!’ This professor really wants to hear what I think,” she said, adding that the interdisciplinarity of the department prepared her for study in her field in unexpected ways.
Also, she said that she’s been able to confront Southern bias as a professor now teaching in New England.
“I am really grateful to have had time training in the South because I can correct some misunderstandings,” Rusert said.
Rusert is an assistant professor in the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is the author of Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture and co-editor of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America, a collection of data visualizations Du Bois contributed to the 1900 Paris Exposition and forthcoming from Princeton Architectural Press in fall 2018. She earned an English Ph.D. and certificate in feminist studies from Duke in 2009. She is beginning a new monograph about William J. Wilson’s African-American Picture Gallery (1859), a text that imagines the first museum of black art in the United States.
Lindsey is an associate professor and the Director of Undergraduate Studies of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University. She authored, Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington D.C., a Choice 2017 “Outstanding Academic Title.” Recently dubbed #ProfessorBae by Bossip magazine, Lindsey’s research and teaching interests include African American women’s history, black popular and expressive culture, black feminism(s), hip hop studies, critical race and gender theory, and sexual politics. She earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in history at Duke.
A lifelong Michael Jackson fan, Alisha Gaines received a Ph.D. in English from Duke and also received the graduate certificate in African and African American Studies. She is assistant professor of English at Florida State University where she won a university-wide Undergraduate Teaching Award in 2017. Her first book, Black for a Day: Fantasies of Race and Empathy, was published in Spring 2017. Inspired by the short-lived F/X reality tv show “Black.White,” the book constructs a genealogy of white liberals who temporarily “become” black under the alibi of racial empathy. As such, Gaines has a love/hate relationship with Rachel Dolezal.
An associate professor of anthropology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, Bianca Williams is also Black Lives Matter organizer, co-founding the Denver chapter. She earned a bachelor’s degree and a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology at Duke, and a graduate certificate in African and African American Studies. Her book, The Pursuit of Happiness: Black Women, Diasporic Dreams, and the Politics of Emotional Transnationalism, how African-American women use international travel and the Internet as tools for pursuing happiness and leisure; creating diasporic relationships; and critiquing American racism and sexism. Central to her research is the question, how do Black women develop strategies for enduring and resisting the effects of racism and sexism, while attempting to maintain emotional wellness?
Neal, host of weekly webcast Left of Black, interviewed the four women about their work earlier that day in the John Hope Franklin Center studio for upcoming episodes of the show. An appearance on Left of Black has increasingly become a rite of passage for a network of young black studies scholars.
“A cohort experience becomes part of our building of knowledge so the production part is apparent. We’re making it as craft, it’s not an arcane thing,” Lubiano, an associate professor of literature and a long-time Duke faculty member, told students at the symposium. “We are actively participating in creating knowledge, thinking about the students and making them central to the work early on.
“I’ve seen students go from undergrad to full professorships,” she said. “Making knowledge is not a finished ‘house,’ we’re always building. It’s important to make your fracturing speak to someone else’s fracturing. We take seriously the process of remaking knowledge.”
Word Work: Race and the Academy (updated)
A Curated Conversation on Race and the Academy
Featuring Melissa Harris-Perry and Karla FC Holloway
*View the program here: wordwork_2016-program
On the occasion of Prof. Holloway’s retirement from Duke University where she is the James B. Duke Professor of English and a professor of law and African & African American Studies, she will be joined in conversation with Melissa Harris-Perry, who is the Maya Angelou Presidential Chair and director of the Anna Julia Cooper Center at Wake Forest University. #wordwork2016
5:00 -7:30 p.m.
Thursday, the 8th of December
Penn Pavilion
Duke University
The conversation will be moderated by:
Blair LM Kelley
Assistant Dean for Interdisciplinary Studies and International Programs
College of Humanites and Social Sciences
North Carolina State University
Kerry Haynie
Associate Professor
Department of Political Science
Co-director, Duke Council on Race and Ethnicity
Duke University
The event is co-sponsored by the Duke Council on Race and Ethnicity and the Talladega College Alumni Association, the Office of the President, the Office of the Provost, the Office of the Dean, the Department of African and African American Studies, the Duke English Department and Duke Law School.
