Join us as we celebrate recent publications from our African American Studies faculty:
Thursday, February 16th at 5 pm
Thaddeus Street Jr. Education Center * Septima Clark Auditorium
25 St. Philip Street, Room 118
origin story: poems by Gary Jackson
origin story outlines a family history of distant sisters, grieving mothers and daughters, and alcoholic fathers. These poems take us from Kansas to Korea and back again in an attempt to reconnect with estranged family and familial ghosts divided by years of diaspora. An interrogation of cultural and personal myths, origin story wrestles with the questions: Who will remember us? How do we deal with the failures of memory? Whose stories are told?
My Soul Is a Witness: The Traumatic Afterlife of Lynching by Mari N. Crabtree
Black southerners often shielded their loved ones from the most painful memories of local lynchings with strategic silences but also told lynching stories about vengeful ghosts or a wrathful God or the deathbed confessions of a lyncher tormented by his past. They protested lynching and its legacies through art and activism, and they mourned those lost to a mob’s fury. They infused a blues element into their lynching narratives to confront traumatic memories and keep the blues at bay, even if just for a spell. Telling their stories troubles the simplistic binary of resistance or submission that has tended to dominate narratives of Black life and reminds us that amid the utter devastation of lynching were glimmers of hope and an affirmation of life.
My Soul Is a Witness traces the long afterlife of lynching in the South through the traumatic memories it left in its wake. She unearths how African American victims and survivors found ways to live through and beyond the horrors of lynching, offering a theory of African American collective trauma and memory rooted in the ironic spirit of the blues sensibility—a spirit of misdirection and cunning that blends joy and pain.
The DC Semester Program for Democracy, Culture, and the Arts (DCSP) is now accepting applications for the Fall 2022 semester! This study away program, which is run by the College of Charleston, provides students who are interested in arts and culture with an opportunity to synthesize their coursework with professional experience at Washington DC-area arts organizations. The program combines a full-time (and often paid) internship in DC (DCSP 395; 6 credits) with a seminar on democracy, culture, and the arts (DCSP 350; 3 credits). Students also take either a 3-credit independent study or a 3-credit online course at the College of Charleston. Combining an internship with coursework has the benefit of helping students build professional contacts and skills while still in school and connecting their academic interests to their professional goals after graduation. For AAST students, the opportunities for arts and culture internships in DC are bountiful—there are dozens of museums, foundations, non-profits, media companies, and government agencies with relevant internships. Also, the African American Studies Program is in the process of allowing DCSP 395 and DCSP 350 to count toward the major and minor in AAST.
The African American Studies Program would like to congradulate and share with you the 2020-2021 recipient of the Bernard E. Powers Writing Award in African American Studies as well as the African American Studies Rising Scholar Award.
The African American Studies Program would like to congradulate and share with you this year’s recipient of the Afrcian American Studies Rising Scholar Award Janae Dorsey.
Our very own Director Kameelah Martin was featured on the CofC’s Blog!