Building African American Literary Projects Through Conversation

By the time we reached the second phase of this Mellon grant, Elizabeth Cali and I had already been in an eleven-year, nearly nonstop conversation about Black writers and artists, African American literary studies, and classroom approaches. The grant gave us an opportunity to extend some of those long-running conversations beyond ourselves and bring the ideas we had been developing to a broader public.

Beginning major African American literary studies projects with extended conversations may seem obvious. But perhaps it isn’t. The reality is that regular, extended conversations among specialists in our discipline are far rarer than we tend to acknowledge.

This is a structural problem. With relatively few scholars of African American literature in most English departments, it is not surprising that there are limited opportunities for scholars to gather regularly and talk through shared questions, methods, and project ideas.

Being a scholar of African American literature is typically structured as a solitary endeavor: teach your classes, write your single-authored articles and books, and move on. Under most circumstances, there is no built-in infrastructure for meeting once or twice per week with colleagues to discuss plans, processes, and shared intellectual concerns. Meetings themselves are discussed in negative terms, in part because they rarely focus on the substance of African American literary projects or collective intellectual work.

Meanwhile, beginning in 2014, my colleagues Tisha Brooks and Elizabeth Cali started meeting weekly to talk about African American literary studies and teaching, a practice that has continued ever since. As the number of colleagues and graduate students working in our area grew, Cali and I added an additional meeting devoted to planning special projects, including this Mellon grant.

I began our once-per-week meetings 2014 with a practical goal in mind: developing a competitive National Endowment for the Humanities grant proposal. Along the way, however, those meetings became spaces for discussions about broader issues in African American literary studies and pedagogy. Those conversations, and the habits they created, paved the way for where we are now.

In some ways, scholars in our field may not fully maximize their connections to one another. Many of us will devote an evening each week to a graduate seminar, yet only occasionally meet with peers. For some, conferences become the primary venue for peer interaction, even though we all know, and rarely say aloud, that conferences are not especially conducive to deep idea development. At best, they happen once a year.

I sometimes wonder: where would my thinking, and where would my projects, be if I only had space for extended idea-generation conversations once a year? What if I wasn't getting regular input from a really good problem solver like Cali? What if scholarly articles and books were my only public projects?

Those questions clarify for me that regular, collective conversation functions as essential infrastructure, shaping how ideas develop and which projects come into being.

Related:

• Developing the Black Lit Network
• Meetings and Happiness?