Duke Department of African & African American Studies to Launch Summer Institute for High School Teachers

AAAS to launch institute to train teachers in new ways of teaching African-American history

New Depth for High School Study of African American Experience

by Deborah Hill | Duke News & Communication

Durham, NC - In the summer of 2013, Duke's Department of African and African American Studies (AAAS) will launch a new summer institute to help high school teachers use more historical literature and fiction to enrich English and social studies classes focused on African American history.

The goal of the project, led by Wahneema Lubiano, associate professor and associate chair of the department, is to expand the use of historical fiction, social research and literary criticism in teaching history. Participants will be exposed to books, short stories, films, music and documentaries that have not traditionally been standard high school fare. The project will develop original lessons plans that will be publicly available on the institute's website.

Institute fellows will read novels such as Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye," Gloria Naylor's "Linden Hills," Black Artemis' "Picture Me Rollin'" and Kyle Baker's graphic novel titled "Nat Turner," as alternatives to commonly used literature. They will also be exposed to social research and literary criticism by luminaries such as Africanist John Henrik Clarke's "William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond;" American Studies scholar George Lipsitz's "Midnight at the Barrelhouse;" and "Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews of Former Slaves," compiled by the Works Progress Administration, as well as work by literary critics Hortense Spillers and Val Smith.

Music by Otis Rush, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells will be part of the curriculum, as well as film and documentary excerpts from "Drop Squad," "The Doll," "CNN Black in America," and "The Brother From Another Planet."  

Story narrative is a powerful part of the human experience, and both novelists and historians engage in storytelling. Lubiano hopes the readings and film excerpts will help participants explore the often-blurred boundaries between fiction and fact. The institute will cultivate discussion on the origins and perpetuation of inequality and the social phenomenon of colorism – discrimination  within a race that is based on skin lightness – and  the similarities and differences in the vision of African American life across fiction and history.

"History, fiction, and social narratives are products of the way that humans both think and imagine the world," said Lubiano. "All narrative calls on us continually to interpret and reinterpret.  I'm interested in social facts and narrative representations.  I think that close reading all manner of texts opens up students' minds to the complexity of our world."

The summer institute, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities through a $200,000 grant, will support 25 teachers from across the United States. The faculty team will provide the 25 institute fellows with exposure to historical fiction, economic history, ethnography, genetics and quantitative social science. The team offers cross-disciplinary expertise that will aid in guiding institute fellows' interpretation and appreciation of the historical fiction, non-fiction, film and analysis.

Duke faculty include Lubiano, a scholar of contemporary African American fiction, cultural studies and critical race theory; AAAS Chair and economist Sandy Darity, whose recent work emphasizes the relationship between literature and social science research; and AAAS/History Associate Professor Thavolia Glymph, whose work focuses on slavery and Reconstruction.

The institute team also includes Bowdoin College literature scholar Tess Chakkalakal (a former postdoctoral fellow on racial and ethnic inequality at Duke), and University of South Carolina School of Education Professor Daniella Ann Cook, who specializes in the pedagogical use of fiction and ethnography.

#Occupy Post-Blackness?

"negro sunshine"--Glenn Ligon

Occupy Post-Blackness?

by Wahneema Lubiano | special to NewBlackman

As some of the contributors articulated in Toure’s Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness, others in numerous pieces of scholarship produced over the past decades, and still others in public discussion in various places, Blackness is both a form of chosen identity and, at the same time, is an imposition from the larger social order.  Under some circumstances that imposition has coercive power and pressure behind it; we don’t live solely within the terms of our own imaginations, not even in our own drama around that identity.  That external imposition often interrupts our identity reveries and speaks a pathology narrative about us and does so sometimes with and sometimes without our own consent.  It is that understanding of the imposition of coercive history in the present moment that makes “post-blackness” inadequate as a rubric for accurately describing the effects of structural racism, of white supremacy in the present.  And Toure takes note of that fact in his book. 

But “post-blackness” is also situational—or, as Michael Eric Dyson asserts in the introduction: “. . . Blackness bends to the tongue it tumbles from at any given moment of time” (xii).  And it is in this regard that I’m interested to some great extent in specific situational elements of the phrase’s use: its use as a means to describe a moment in cultural, artistic, or emotional self-understanding – yes, there indeed I can see its usefulness and it is that usefulness that I’m addressing when I’m quoted in the book talking about why Dave Chapelle’s show prompted me away from any simple dismissal of the phrase when Toure first brought it up in our conversation.  I thought that the phrase was a useful way to describe what I saw as a kind of pre-figurative existence in Chapelle’s work—he was performing possibilities of art—of humor and wit—that were not completely captured by the imposition of social blackness both across our history and in the present moment.

Yet, the phrase itself is redolent of past decades of anxiety about black art, black cultural production—an anxiety exemplified in the 1926 fight, in the pages of The Nation magazine, between Langston Hughes (“The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”) and George Schuyler (“The Negro Art Hokum”) around the burden of representation (as Stuart Hall has described it) for Negro artists.  “Post-blackness” is a rubric that reminds me that cultural producers are continually caught in the dilemma in the West of a pressure to define themselves, to distinguish themselves, as mythic individuals—that’s the ur-narrative of U.S. individuality writ large; so, of course, artists, other cultural producers, cultural critics, and we ourselves continually produce narratives of “generational shift”—it’s a handy way to make individual space, to posit a conversational imperative, and have that imperative recognized. And it doesn’t much matter, when that posture is assumed, that space claimed, whether it is a new moment in fact or a seemingly new moment—the gesture is meant to establish a possibility here and now.  I find those repeated moments sociologically rich and interesting.

But while I don’t want to cast aspersions on that gesture, I do want to move onto something else that came up as we explored the gesture of Thelma Golden and Glenn Ligon, something that I’d love to talk about more, if people care to, and it’s this: the social utility, the currency, of post-blackness. Let me make what I’m saying more concrete.

When Toure asked me about the most racist thing that ever happened to me, my first response (along with many of the other contributors he quoted) was to say that structural racism enacted itself in such a way that I wasn’t personally confronted with the most racist things that had ever happened to me.  But Toure pushed back on this; he pushed me to think about my earlier and younger understandings of racism: the moment prior to my arrival at an analysis of structural racism.  He wanted me to speak about something that hurt way back when.  So, I told a story from my high school years and a bad encounter with a guidance counselor bigot because that story gave me a chance to talk about Howard University; being a student at Howard was a moment of a kind of pre-figurative post-blackness for me.  The most powerful take-away of that story was not the incident with the guidance counselor.  What transformed my life was my discovery of a rich and complex existence within the terms of blackness (a situated blackness) at Howard University.  I found ordinary life at Howard. (That was the saving grace.)

My imagination’s earned currency of post-blackness in turn contributed to a moment of real tension at the end of my interview with Toure when we were talking about Barack Obama, and he asked “How do we create more Barack Obamas?”  In my response, I remember telling Toure that while Obama is certainly exceptional in that sense that he’s the U.S. head of state, he is also ordinary; he is the matter-of-fact product of his class origins and his elite education.  I know thousands of people who are proudly Black and intellectual, as Toure described him, but Obama’s existence, like theirs, like ours, was largely a matter of chance and the specifics of history.  An elite education produces a Barack Obama or any number of other specific kinds of black—or other—intellectuals. 

              

It is the constraint of capitalism that restricts those numbers.  My last sentence of that exchange was “And I think capitalism is a really bad idea.”  I remember that Toure responded with “Wow, we’ll really have to talk about that sometime.” 

              

This then might be a great time for all of us to talk about the currency of post-blackness within the terms of late capitalism in this moment of occupy everywhere.

***

Wahneema Lubiano is Associate Professor of Literature and African & African American Studies at Duke University.  Lubiano is the editor of The House That Race Built:  Black Americans, US Terrain

Atelier@Duke: A Conversation with Touré – Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness

Atelier@Duke

A Conversation with Touré – Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness

Duke University

Goodson Chapel [Divinity School]

December 1, 2011

5:00pm

A conversation with Touré—American novelist, essayist, music journalist, cultural critic, and television personality based in New York City based on his book Who's Afraid of Post Blackness? joined by Duke faculty Mark Anthony Neal and Wahneema Lubiano, and North Carolina State University Historian Blair LM Kelley; Moderated by Duke Professor Maurice O. Wallace.

Office Hours with Duke Professor Wahneema Lubiano [video]

Duke University Professor Wahneema Lubiano, one of the founding voices of Black Cultural Studies in the United States, answers questions about using literary tools to understand images in the media and objects in everyday life during a live "Office Hours" conversation October 6, 2011.

Learn more at http://www.dukeofficehours.com.

For Colored Girls: A Town Hall Gathering

For Colored Girls

A Town Hall Meeting
w/ the Department of African & African-American Studies

featuring Professors

Wahneema Lubiano
Tarshia Stanley
William "Sandy" Darity
Maurice Wallace
Jennifer Brody
Mark Anthony Neal


November 16, 2010 | 7:00 PM
The Mary Lou Williams Center
Duke University
919.684.3814