Dispatches from American Studies
Reflections on craft, and some recc's for your TBR biography stack.
Header picture is of Maya Angelou, who famously rented a hotel room just for writing and sipped sherry through her working day.
I’ve just gotten back from SLSA in Tempe, Arizona, and ASA in Montreal. It’s been a good two weeks, if not slightly exhausting. I’m also feeling totally saturated: saturated with ideas, with personal reflections, with “people energy” (shout out to my introverts). I’m still integrating all of it, but part of that integration is also calling out for me to write some of it down. It’s too much to keep in my head.
This was my second time at ASA, and I think I need to admit that there’s no real, direct, work-related reason for me to attend this conference. There’s very little here on the digital or media studies (at least in the way that I understand and perform those disciplines). But goddamn, does this conference feed my soul (and not solely because the commitment to after-hours dancing is that good). Unintentionally (or maybe by virtue of my own unconscious, professionally untethered curation) the panels I attended all felt like meditations on writing and craft.
I was most struck by the collapse of forms and content; people talked and wrote and thought in ways that had no distinction. The categories infected each other. I noticed this during a roundtable where the panelists discussed their work and answered questions live but through spoken modes of literary technique. So, for example, I’m thinking about how La Marr Jurelle Bruce responded to the title of the Duke publication series, The Black Outdoors, by riffing on and fleshing out the call-to-action of “You smell like outside” as a metaphor for Blackness as well as a political orientation. And then, without missing a beat, RA Judy made the response to Bruce’s call by explaining that “You smell like outside” is always joined by “Go take a bath,” and then again the following day with “Boy, go back outside.” And so it went with this discussion, with panelists constantly moving across registers, back and forth, of shared cultural memory, metaphor, politics, and deconstruction. It was beautifully intricate, and that felt really profound. Note: I’ve re-read this paragraph now a few times, and I’ve not conveyed what I experienced. There is no way for me to write this description out with any more detail or precise articulation. This is exactly how it went. And YET: it is also a total failure to capture the moment. I feel like I’m explaining a joke in scientific detail and still expecting to make somebody laugh! Impossible.
A panel on Black Radical Biography seemed destined to be about the craft of writing but was actually about how one conducts oneself in relation to scholarly work. The chair of the panel, Stephen Ward, noted that the idea of a radical biography (and not just a biography of a radical) is inherently marked by the lack of an archive in any coherent or conventional sense. And (what I thought was even more interesting) that the lives of the kinds of people about whom one might write a radical biography often run concurrent to the forms that would support biography. Biographers writing radical biographies are working against their subjects as they work with them.
Maybe this is why Garrett Felber (who has a biography coming out on Martin Sostre) summarized the situation like this: these radical biographies were really more of a community history than a biography. This is truly, materially apparent in the biography Ashley D. Farmer is writing on Queen Mother Audley Moore. Queen Mother Moore has no formalized archive–it’s just bits of stuff here, there, and everywhere–that Farmer has had to go through and collect. This is also where the duality of life shines because assembling the scattered biography of Moore and Sostre has often meant that it’s been Felber or Farmer who have had to show family members of Sostre and Moore details about their family for the first time. The biographers are the ones to dispatch personal and intimate details or news to close family, or repair rifts, or give closure in absentia. When the panelists shared these stories, it was a stunning reinforcement of how much humanity is demanded of certain scholars, and at a kind of unrelenting clip.
IIRC Mary Phillips, writing on Erika Huggins, came to this community history/radical biography observation from an interesting place because part of Erika Huggins’ “community history” is overwhelmed by the presence and the role of the prison. But it was interesting to hear Phillps talk about how she, as author and researcher, necessarily inserted herself into community, and fundamentally rearranged it, by using her PhD to gain access to the women’s prison and then inviting local librarians (who had been trying and failing to gain access) in through her access. This reflection reminded me of a conversation I had with my dear friend (and excellent philosopher) Mijke van der Drift, who told me that when you get into power, when you climb the ranks of an institution, you have an obligation to
prevent further extraction of the people by the institution, and
perform your duties while holding a back door open for others to come in.
You savy readers will likely notice the resonances here between this thinking and Moten/Harney’s mandate to abuse the hospitality of the institution, and that “the only possible relationship to the university today is a criminal one.” Evergreen words to live by.
I’ll leave with a few biography/memoir/autobiography recommendations that I picked up for my TBR and that I’ve enjoyed. I’m assuming everyone here has already read Malcolm X’s autobiography (though I’m guilty of not yet having tackled Marable’s biography) and that a few of you might have also read Assata’s. The suggestions below are all US-focused, and primarily on important Black/African American figures. Send me your suggestions for non-US biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs!
On my TBR (recc’s from the panel): Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition; Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol; Florynce Flo Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical; Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision.
Some of MY favs: I think my gateway memoir was Gloria Steinem’s My Life on the Road. From that, I was determined to read more about Wilma Mankiller, but I’m afraid I found her autobiography really, really flat (it was a heartbreak! But a fun cover to walk around with). I’ve since then read Richard Pryor’s autobiography and this biography, which have secured spots on my TBR for Pryor’s daughter’s book and the biography of Miles Davis (a tome). Pryor is fascinating, but really tough to reckon with as such a deeply flawed, wounded, and profoundly violent person.
Last, as a book that sort of combined biography with experimental narrative (maybe?), My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir was a surprise hit for me. It’s tender and sweet and I’ve certainly gushed about it to more than one of you. There’s a passage on queer longing, where McCullers is so overcome with emotion that it drives her to bake lots and lots and lots of fudge for her, ahem, friend. Ever since reading it I’ve felt arrested by the idea that a human is capable of a longing so strong that it has to relieve itself in the act of being consumed even if by proxy–that desire could so powerfully overrun a person as to make them fantasize about the destruction of their own flesh. And of course, fudge is just the most unexpected but perfect avatar: so rich and decadent it becomes cloying; something to eat that always marries joy with pain, delight with a stomach ache. Happy reading!