Monthly Archives: February 2018

Coursework, Mental Health, Ravynn, Ravynn: Act 2, Ravynn: Act 2, Scene 2, Uncategorized

Week 6, or The Psychic Violence of Graduate School

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I had one really rough class this week. At the break in my three hour seminar, one of my classmates approached me and asked me why I had been quieter than usual so far. I told her that I didn’t have much to say considering that one of the pieces we had read for the week involved a grotesque amount of explicitly described violence against enslaved people, particularly assault against enslaved women. Another African American student from the class described the experience of reading such things traumatic. I was angry because it taught me less about a history of racial formation than it did about a history of the horrific things white slaveholders could do to enslaved people.

I am an incredibly sensitive person, despite whatever impression one may have of me. I found myself unable to watch movies about slavery until I was in college because I would have a panic attack. Even then, I still haven’t seen 12 Years a Slave because I know how much violence is in it. It is a psychic assault in some ways to be forced to read about the traumas suffered by your ancestors as written by a man whose ancestors would have been enslavers.

So I did the one thing that I have a hard time doing: I spoke up.

I expressed my concerns about the gratuitous violence and fought back against the students that tried to assert that violence is an effective learning tool. I countered by saying, “The first time you think to yourself, ‘oh, Black lives do matter’ should not be when you see a dead body on the 5 o’clock news.” We shouldn’t need violence to prove that the institution of slavery was horrifying and we shouldn’t use violence as a tool because it becomes a spectacle. This is one of the main arguments of another text that we read for this week: Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection. I appreciated the ways in which she acknowledged violence without letting it become the focal point of her work and therefore a spectacle.

Black pain has been a spectacle in this country for as long as Black and white people have coexisted in America. (To put ‘being forcibly removed from one’s own continent and forced to do hard labor’ gently.)

Because Black pain has moved into different arenas, including the classroom, we need new tactics to deal with it. For the purpose of thinking productively, I want to include a list of things that you can do, and that I have done, to protect yourself in moments of psychic violence in the classroom:

  • Take a break. When I find myself overwhelmed by a classroom discussion that just isn’t going my way, I excuse myself and take a walk around the hallways.
  • Write down your ‘would be’ responses. One thing I started doing last semester in a similar class was to write down my responses to the problematic statements happening in the event that I didn’t get a chance to get a word in edgewise.
  • Speak up. This is hard to do and requires a lot of bravery that I do not have, often preferring to internalize the hardness of the conversation and reflect on it in writing later on.
  • Speak to your professor privately. I have always found talking to my professors about concerns I have in their classes to be productive. This is something that I haven’t done yet, but I think I might do in the future.
  • Tag team. My friend pointed out that when there are moments of violence that you are trying to address but that might be difficult or traumatizing for you to do, tag in a friend to help you fight.
  • Self-care. Sometimes the best option is to opt out and preserve yourself to fight another fight, which is usually my option. It’s a cop out option to be sure, but I admit that I simply am not a fighter in the conventional sense.

These moments happen. They happen more often than one would care to admit. They’re troubling, difficult, disappointing and sometimes can drive you to want to leave this whole world of the Academy behind. This moment happened on the tail end of a week where I have very seriously considered taking my Master’s degree and calling it quits. One of the things that gets me through is the hope of creating my own classroom where I can minimize the degree of pain. I don’t want to be the type of professor that turns away from conversations regarding my students’ pain because it is uncomfortable. I want my students to be able to come to me with that and I want us to be able to work through it together. I’m in this race because I simply don’t want other students of color to have these isolating and traumatic experiences. I’m in this for them.

Ravynn: Act 2, Ravynn: Act 2, Scene 2, Research, Uncategorized

Week 5, or Confessions of Black Panther Scholar

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WARNING: Black Panther spoilers ahead.

I was worried I wouldn’t love Black Panther.

I’m an aca-fan, a term that scholar Henry Jenkins uses to denote someone who is a fan of the things they study. I’m an aca-fan of Black Panther, in a very serious way. I have so much personal investment in the character, the narrative, and the authors that Black Panther turned into the focal point of my Master’s thesis.

I spent so much time wading waist deep in the comics from the late 1960s, critiquing, speculating, diving for meaning, that I worried I would not be able to simply enjoy the Black Panther film. Coupled with my anxieties about still enjoying the film were the expectations regarding my response. People laughed when I said I was not planning to write anything about Black Panther. I had inadvertently become– to some– an authority on Black Panther. I don’t believe that I am and to be frank, I don’t want to be. It doesn’t give you space to make mistakes, learn, grow. I am a Black Panther scholar with lots of questions I need to ask and still more to learn. I was worried that people would be expecting too much of me and I think that worry robbed me of a little of my joy in the weeks leading up to the film.

I tried my best to separate my academic self from my fan self so I could enjoy the film, but in the same way I cannot tear my womanhood from my Blackness, I was not able to do so. But I am so glad that I couldn’t– because it makes my love for Black Panther all the more rich.

So here are my top three favorite things about the Black Panther film:

  1. The diverse displays of Black womanhood. My favorite thing about Black Panther is all of the amazing Black women that surround him. Shuri represents a force in the STEM field, while managing to provide most of the laughs in the film, keeping her brother on his toes and also still managing to kick a little ass. Nakia gives T’Challa the Wakandan equivalent of a “Boy, bye” when he tells her if she weren’t so stubborn, she’d make a great queen. And Okoye– by far my favorite of all the fearless and strong women that make up the cast of characters in Black Panther. She gets to strike fear into the hearts of her enemies, deliver some of the funniest lines, and be in love with with her partner and her country. Needless to say, I’d drop out of grad school in a heartbeat if it meant I got to join the Dora Milaje.
  2. Killmonger as a character and the fact that he is driven by desire to liberate African Diasporic peoples. Michael B. Jordan as a person is a fan favorite for me but as Killmonger he was impeccable. Killmonger, in this rendition, is a Black liberationist. T’Challa and Killmonger are represent two strands of a potential strategy for liberation, and, to be honest, Killmonger’s arguments were compelling.
  3. The actual space of Wakanda. Walking into theaters filled with excited Black people made the on screen space of Wakanda even more real. My love letter to Wakanda would include a line about my pride for this powerful, culturally rich nation. It would praise the traditions and the King. It would give thanks for providing a space for me to be the fullest, most uncontained version of myself. My love letter to Wakanda would include how glad I am simply for Wakanda to exist, even if just in my imagination. Wakanda is real. It is my home. It is my heart. This is why representation matters.

Since Thursday, I’ve seen Black Panther three times. It gets better every time. I love it more every time. The characters become my friends. Wakanda becomes my home.

Maybe someday I’ll write that think piece that everyone is waiting for. But today, I just want to enjoy Black Panther.

Wakanda Forever.

Ravynn, Ravynn: Act 2, Ravynn: Act 2, Scene 2, Uncategorized

Week 4, or Meeting Henry Jenkins

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One of my favorite things about being in grad school is getting to meet people. Through conferences, public seminars and video calls, I’ve gotten to meet amazing people, including quite a few authors whose work I’ve come across in course work. Within just the last two weeks, I’ve been able to talk with Dr. Johnnetta Cole (a post about that experience can be found here) and, this past week, Dr. Henry Jenkins.

I first encountered Henry Jenkins’s work as an undergrad in a required critical theory course for my Comparative Literature major at the University of Virginia. After stuffing my head full of Althusser, Freud, and Barthes all semester, I distinctly remember finally being able to breathe– I could finally read an article once and get the gist of it. Not only did I understand, I was enthralled by his discussion of fan culture. As an avid Tumblr user at the time, I didn’t know that there were people who studied and talked about communities in which I belonged. Jenkins was my key to understanding that not everything academic had to be dense and difficult to engage.

My second encounter with Jenkins’s work was just last semester in my New Media, Old Media class, in which we read Convergence Culture. As we read through case studies of collective participation through Survivor spoilers and political activism through Harry Potter, I found myself again utterly inspired by the clarity of Jenkins’s prose and the innovativeness of his ideas. My ideas were no longer an island. Through Jenkins I found a way to ground my work and a model for moving forward.

Getting to meet Dr. Jenkins in person, therefore, was quite an experience. Liz Losh, my professor and mentor through the Equality Lab, arranged for a group of us to have a private lunch with Dr. Jenkins, during which we had an informal conversation. The conversation produced questions such as how do you stay true to yourself as you pursue work as a scholar? How do you withstand disappointment and critique? Do you have any writing tips? All questions to which Jenkins had generous and “therapeutic” answers. He told us all writing is rewriting, encouraged us to write with colleagues and develop an online presence. He told us about his personal experiences with being openly and somewhat hostilely critiqued and encouraged us to take a high road– engage, cautiously, and look for points of commonality and misunderstanding rather than investing yourself in a counter attack. And most importantly, I think, he encouraged us to think of doing interdisciplinary work as “undisciplined,” in the best way. This means that we should not limit ourselves based on discipline but follow our interests as far as they take us, borrowing from whatever toolkits we have available, using whomever we find inspiring, to come up with exciting new ideas. Strictly following the rules of any one discipline will only get us so far. We are the intellectual entrepreneurs. We are the undisciplined.

That night, after the excellent lunch, I attended Jenkins’s public lecture in which he discussed the civic imagination, its functions and results. It was a multifaceted presentation which drew from a broad range of sources: from Foucault to Stuart Hall, Superman to J. K. Rowling, Black Panther to Ms. Marvel. In essence, the talk encouraged us, the audience, to think of the civic imagination as something that can help better the world: it can help us imagine a process of change, imagine the self as a civic agent, and imagine the experiences and perspectives of others. This is what helps us go out into the world and create better futures based on what we have imagined.

Dr. Henry Jenkins is a self-proclaimed optimist. It was refreshing to encounter someone so celebratory after learning to do nothing but critique for a year and a half. He’s inspired me not to give up on my ambition to become a public intellectual, because public-facing academics are what we need. He reminded me to think of the real root of the word that will become my career: professor, or one who professes. Knowledge is not mine to hoard but something which I profess. Now that is something I can believe in.