September 3, 2016 - 18:21
My class will meet in Taylor C on Tuesday. Back-story and probably more re-situatings to follow!
Speaking of which….
Last fall, I was very lucky to share a dinner, and then attend a workshop, with Fred Moton, who co-wrote The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, a book that has been very important in helping me recognize and articulate my vision of what college teaching-and-learning might be. One of the historical practices that Moton evokes is “marronage,” the process of extricating oneself from slavery by escaping to live permanently in free independent settlements. He calls up these historical practices to evoke
the underground, the downlow low-down maroon community of the university…the undercommons of enlightenment, where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong….
The maroons know something about possibility. They are the condition of possibility of the production of knowledge in the university….It is not just the labor of the marrons but their prophetic organization….the maroons refuse to refuse professionalization, that is, to be against the university….
Following Moton, I see myself not as “against” the university, but rather as working within it to expand what it is possible here and beyond. And I think that the labor we were doing together on Friday—and that I anticipate our continuing to do over the next several months—has some of the qualities that Moton describes, in seeking out alternative relationships to the academy, and to one another, which allow us to engage deeply, and simultaneously, in both personal and professional work together. Monique said something similar to this yesterday when she was talking about how to make anger productive: “turn it into work!”
This morning my daughter Marian gave me an article that is a beautiful illustration of this principle, and one we are going to get to see in action @ the new museum in D.C. before the month is out!
The Great Dismal Swamp is not so far from where Joni grew up/from where I went to school, at The College of William and Mary. A September 2016 article in the Smithsonian Magazine tells about the archeological work of Dan Sayers, who is excavating evidence of the maroon settlements in the swamp. Sayers says that
"Archaeology is my activism. Rather than go to the Washington Mall and hold up a protest sign, I choose to dig in the Great Dismal Swamp. By bringing a resistance story to light, you hope it gets into people’s heads.”
....at the new National Museum of African American History and Culture, an exhibit about the maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp is scheduled to go on view. For the curator Nancy Bercaw, it presented an unusual challenge. “The ethos here is that objects should speak for themselves,” she says, talking over coffee in her office. “Dan Sayers generously gave us ten objects. They are reworked pebbles, shims for post holes, tiny fragments of stone from an unnamed island. Some of them look like grains of sand.”
...They are not the sort of objects, in other words, that catch the eye or speak for themselves. Her solution was to mount some of them in jewel cases like priceless treasures. The exhibit is in the 17,000-square-foot Slavery and Freedom gallery, in a section about free communities of color. “Traditionally, we’ve studied the institution of slavery, not enslavement as it was lived,” she says. “Once you start looking at our history through an African-American lens, it really changes the focus. Maroons become much more significant.”
Read more @ http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/deep-swamps-archaeologists-fugitive-slaves-kept-freedom-180960122/#dIbvfjCr9GSwjUGD.99
The other pretty astonishing, and not-unrelated, story of weekend is Georgetown University’s announcement of its plans to atone for its past reliance on Maryland plantations to finance its operations. It’s making the unprecedented offer to award preferential status in the admissions process to descendants of those who were enslaved. This plan goes further than any other university that’s publicly recognized its ties to the slave trade—though how meaningful this offer will really be depends on how much GU invests in outreach to descendants, identifying them, making sure they are aware of the benefit’s existence, actively recruiting them to the university....Read more @ http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/02/us/slaves-georgetown-university.html?_r=0
After I "dismissed class" on Friday, Marian and I drove together to our farm in Virginia. I was reveling in the openness of the sky, the stretch of the fields, the pleasure of being with my daughter (reliving her middle school years, listening to “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill"), glad to be getting off campus, "outside"....
Reading these articles this morning, and recalling Moton's work, reminded me there really is no outside to the work we are doing.
Its tendrils stretch far and wide--and then back again into each of us.
So, yes. Keep breathing. Deeply.
In shared hope, and so glad we are working together,
Anne