The Category Is . . . Opulence!

In recent years there has been a strong “public turn” within universities that is renewing interest in collaborative approaches to knowledge creation. This article draws on performance studies literature to explore the cross-disciplinary collaborations made possible when the academy broadens our scope of inquiry to include knowledge produced through performance. It takes as a case study the “Peabody Ballroom Experience,” an ongoing collaboration between the Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries, the Peabody Institute BFA Dance program, and Baltimore’s ballroom community—a performance-based arts culture comprising gay, lesbian, queer, transgender, and gender-nonconforming people of color.

Rosetta Douglass Sprague on Anna Murray Douglass

None

African Caribbean Residents of Edinburgh in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Scotland is gradually coming to terms with its involvement in slavery and colonialism as part of the British Empire. This article places the spotlight on the lives of African Caribbean people who were residents of Edinburgh during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I discuss their varied experiences and contributions: from runaways and men fighting for their freedom in the Scottish courts to women working as servants in city households or marrying into Edinburgh high society. The nineteenth century saw activism among political radicals from abolitionists to anticolonialists; some of these figures studied and taught at Edinburgh University. Their stories reflect the Scottish capital’s many direct connections with the Caribbean region.

“Take the Mask Off”

On March 10, 1895, a young woman named Maud Clark wrote a letter to writer, performer, and activist Paul Laurence Dunbar in which she told him to “take the mask off.” This article takes this phrase as its analytical point of departure, seeking to reconceptualise, retheorise, and reinvestigate Dunbar’s biography through Clark’s words and the symbol of the mask. Repositioning Dunbar’s biography within the political, aesthetic, and psychological realities of his world, the article takes the symbol of Paul Laurence Dunbar in new directions, recognising the limitations of traditional biography and instead working toward a new and multifarious understanding of the man and his many masks.

“Any Leadership Would Have to Be the Type of Frederick Douglass”

The inspiration for twentieth-century activist-artist Jacob Lawrence’s multipart narrative series Frederick Douglass (1938–1939), a thirty-two-panel work he painted while he was living in Harlem, emerged from his exposure to the stories of “strong, daring and heroic black heroes and heroines.” Whereas it had been an act of philosophical and political liberation for Frederick Douglass to focus on the “multitudinous” possibilities of textual experimentation and visual reimagining when it came to his own face and body, let alone his life story and his intellectual and moral power as an orator and author, for social justice artists such as Jacob Lawrence who were building new languages of liberation from Douglass’s activism and authorship, it was imperative that he become a point of origin, a Founding Father in a Black revolutionary tradition, and a steadying compass point for acts of radicalism, reform, and resistance in the African Atlantic world.

Interview with Sir Geoff Palmer

Kalfou: What is the meaningful work that acts of historical commemoration can perform in the present? Palmer: The plaque to Frederick Douglass in Edinburgh and the slavery plaque at Glasgow University are important because they reflect the conclusion that although we cannot change the past, we can change cruel consequences, such as racism, for the better. These plaques also tell us that truthful narratives on plaques inform the public of a history which says that although we are different, we have the same humanity. A diverse society requires diverse attention to be efficient and fair. A fairness which changes the evil of “go home” to the goodness of “come home.”

Place Making and Place Marking

I encountered the film Strike for Freedom and the introduction to this special issue of Kalfou shortly before the 2019 winter break. It was perfect timing—just as I was traveling to Virginia to spend the holidays with my family members who are based in Charlottesville. There, the enshrinement of white supremacy is hard to ignore: the enduring effects of slavery unwilling to die are found quite literally at every turn. It is a landscape that remains difficult to traverse—requiring a constant reckoning with the social and spatial determinations of humanity for self and other. But the film directed by Parisa Urquhart (2019) and the introduction authored by Celeste-Marie Bernier and Nicole Willson (2020) reassured me of a continued and collaborative strike for freedom, in particular through the development of oppositional forms of place making and place marking. This occurs in a number of ways, including memory, history, testimony, and creative practice, to reinscribe the landscape, turning segregation into congregation, a process that works (as George Lipsitz makes clear in How Racism Takes Place) “to transform divisiveness into solidarity, to change dehumanization into rehumanization.” I have thought a lot about congregation in particular—as it points to a necessary relatedness, to kinship in and through place, as the essential grounding for a continued strike for freedom, be it the relatedness of family for Frederick Douglass or for me in Charlottesville, or be it the scholarly and other forms of collaboration that bring us together in configurations of intellectual kinship that extend across different settings and platforms. To map these connections is to understand the interconnected threads of the freedom struggle, the footsteps that those before us took, the routes we now take, and the new constructs and practices of relatedness we develop.

Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass, Black abolitionist, author, and statesman, was born into chattel slavery in the United States in 1818. Douglass’s antislavery activism inspired his sons to fight in the Civil War to end slavery in the nation (1861–1865). It also enabled him to meet other U.S. abolitionists such as James McCune Smith, the first Black American graduate in medicine (Glasgow University, 1837), as well as John Brown and Abraham Lincoln. Douglass arrived in Scotland in 1846, where he gave many lectures on the evils of chattel slavery and was aware of the roles politicians and the church played in maintaining this institution. He argued that if the Free Church of Scotland refused to help to abolish slavery in the United States, it should “Send Back The Money” that it acquired from slaveholding investors. A commemorative plaque to Frederick Douglass was unveiled in Edinburgh in November 2018. This article reflects on Frederick Douglass’s activism in Scotland and what it means for Scotland’s African diasporic residents.

Vestiges of Black Internationalism

The siege led by the Continental Army to reclaim Savannah from British forces in the fall of 1779 is remembered as one of the most disastrous battles of the American Revolutionary War. However, greater carnage was circumvented by a legion of (largely) free Black Chasseurs Volontaires recruited from the colony of Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti). Their role proved strategically vital, and a monument erected in Savannah’s Franklin Square today pays homage to their contributions to the American project of independence. Indeed, the beguiling mythos of independence suffuses their historic legacy. Yet although their story is remembered in African American histories from the nineteenth century to the present, they are systematically occluded, marginalized, and overlooked by the colonialist archive. This article interrogates the violence of archival erasure and demands interdisciplinary, multimodal, and collaborative modes of recreating and rehabilitating lost African Atlantic histories.

The Poetics of Place and Expressions of Oppositional Memory

The Black Atlantic creation of alternative archives illustrated in Parisa Urquhart’s 2019 documentary Strike for Freedom, which chronicles the unveiling of a historical plaque in Edinburgh to commemorate Frederick Douglass’s activism while he was in exile in Scotland, has a long and meaningful history. People without control over—or even access to—papers of state, conquerors’ memoirs, or officially commissioned histories have carried out the work of recovering, remembering, and reimagining the past through creative deployment of the meager tools at their disposal: stories, songs, and other forms of expressive culture and decoration, including three-dimensional artifacts of material culture such as medallions, buttons, drums, coins, statues, and Masonic aprons. In this article, we survey past and present manifestations of countermemory, place making, and place marking to locate Strike for Freedom within a larger story of oppositional countermemory.