In Part 4, Pablo asks what I was doing now that my book Living with Lynching was doing its work in the world. We were speaking in August 2012, so I mentioned Black LIT Radio; my essay “James Baldwin, Performance Theorist, Sings the Blues for Mister Charlie;” and my involvement in Black Girls RUN!, founded by Toni Carey and Ashley Hicks. I also shared my vision for a mentoring program that connects OSU English alumni and current students and mentioned that I’m on Twitter @ProfKori.
OSU Book Interview, Part 3
In Part 3, Pablo notes that I am a literary scholar, not a historian. He therefore asks, how did I use literary works as historical documents and convince other researchers of the validity of that methodology. Such an insightful question!
We also discuss performance as “embodied practices of belonging;” Diana Taylor‘s theory of “the archive and the repertoire;” why Crisis magazine (which is still published today) is important to Living with Lynching; and how my research influences my perspective on the present.
On this last issue—how my expertise regarding the past impacts my understanding of the present—talking with Pablo led me to make points that I think are especially important. They involve 1) recognizing that lynching was a theatrical practice and 2) my investment in critical reading practices. As I explain around 10:20 in the video, I believe I am modeling critical reading practices in my blog post “The American Way: Mediocrity, When White, Looks Like Merit.” (People continue to contact me about that piece to say that they find it useful and empowering.)
OSU Book Interview, Part 2
Our nation remains invested in sending a powerful message, that denigrating and/or destroying people of color will bring no consequences for perpetrators. (In fact, it will often bring rewards.) While we can’t help but get that message, Americans somehow see those under attack as primarily male. Besides underscoring the ongoing importance of movements like #WhyWeCantWait, this tendency reminds me of how much the suppression of Black and Brown women’s voices within my educational experiences led me to pursue the PhD.
In Part 2 of the interview, Pablo and I talk about my years in graduate school and the research interests that eventually produced Living with Lynching. These include my interest in what Black women were writing between 1870 and 1920 (the year Black men gained voting rights and the year women did); why post-Reconstruction proves to be a crucially important time period; why photography matters; why so many of the lynching plays are one-acts; and my insistence that black-authored lynching plays are not primarily protest plays.
OSU Book interview, Part 1
For at least the past 4 months, I’ve been struck by how painfully relevant my research on violence is. It’s hard to keep things straight because violence against Black and Brown people is so rampant. If we consider the past few years, even a very partial list of those killed (not just harassed or injured) by police (not civilians) becomes shocking: 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones, 12-year-old Tamir Rice, 12-year-old Santos Rodriguez, 13-year-old Andy Lopez Cruz, 14-year-old Cameron Tillman, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Ezell Ford, John Crawford, Mateo Carlo Machella, Israel Hernandez Llach, Constantino Garcia, Carlos Mejia, Osman Hernandez, Omar Abrego, Rakia Boyd, and countless other women and trans men and women whose names we don’t know.
Especially because my book Living with Lynching centers on how people coped when they were so clearly under attack, I thought this would be a good time to revisit an in-depth conversation I had with my OSU colleague Pablo Tanguay about the book and the journey that led me to write it. The interview is in 4 parts. In this first part, we talk about my growing up in Sugar Land, Texas; my experiences as an undergraduate at Ohio Wesleyan University; and how those experiences made me interested in graduate study. Hint: Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and a fabulous internship in New York City played major roles.
Especially when everything is against certain populations, it’s hard to overstate the value of reading and being willing to expose oneself (and the young people in our lives) to a variety of experiences.