Fine Arts & Africana Studies

John McCluskey, Jr. (speaking) with Courtney Bryan, Eric J. Henderson, and Erica R. Edwards

Photograph by A. H. Jerriod Avant © 2014

Africana studies is strategically placed to embrace the fine and performing arts into its curricula. This is a challenge evident from the insistence or responses of students, colleagues, and interested observers of university curriculum-building over the years. From their inception the placement of history and literature at the core of the emerging field (not yet a discipline) has been consistent from programs and departments across the country. In the majority of programs, the fine arts (creative writing, dance, music, film) came late to the curriculum core. This, despite the powerful currents within the concurrent Black Arts movement of the late 1960s and 1970s particularly in poetry and short dramas. There may be many reasons for this historically, but in my brief remarks I plan to focus on only a couple. I fashion no hierarchy among those programs with or without a strong presence of fine arts. Specifically, I want to offer commentary on the practitioner of fine arts in the academy.

The classical ideal of the liberally educated man and woman emphasized a curriculum that would result in an individual deeply conversant in the humanities—philosophy, history as approached many years ago, religious studies, literary history and criticism, as well as social history, economics, and political science. These would be taught by those with terminal degrees in the fields. Whenever possible, this notion was held by the curriculum builders at early African American colleges.

In addition to their tireless and stoic efforts at pushing the agenda of industrial education during the early-twentieth century, among others Mary McLeod Bethune and Booker T. Washington invited Black writers and musical performers to their campuses. In his ringing conclusion to his masterful essay, “Of the Wings of Atalanta,” Du Bois says succinctly on the teaching mission of the first generation of Black colleges: “Teach workers to work. … Teach thinkers to think. And the final product of our training must be neither a psychologist or a brickmason, but a man.” If I qualify that only slightly to mean a “complete human being,” the challenge is clear to the mission of Black education, then and now. How might the teaching and learning of the fine arts play a role in Africana studies, specifically, in developing that complete person? Indeed how might the arts enter into the discussion of pedagogy and the very ethics of program building?

Decades later, enter the placement and role of the practitioner of the fine arts among the faculty of Africana studies. As the professoriate professionalized itself during the past century, there arose among American university faculties a growing anxiety among the creative artists—the poets, choreographers, painters, playwrights—and those who taught history, criticism, and theory in literature, art, and dance. Leaving aside the stereotypes of the creative artist—disorganized, given to emotional outbursts, helpless before the tedium of the day-to-day, such as faculty meetings, fidgeting in anticipation of inspiration (the list goes on)—there was the suspicion of rigor. I mean here both the suspicion of rigor as an instructor and the suspicion of rigor afforded to the creative works by a colleague. The bias within the notion of a spontaneous poem or piece of choreography is as wide of the mark as the notion of the naturally gifted elite athlete. The hours of endless revising to achieve a distant perfection parallels the hours of endless practice to reach the “top of one’s game” in basketball or swimming or figure skating. Those who have taught creative writing workshops will attest to the effort to guide and coax a body of polished prose or poetry from our students. Those who have been students in these workshops can also attest to the attention to detail, perseverance, and hopefully deep respect for the craft. Again the professionals who write know that the perfect line in cadence and sense is the line known as the horizon.

Still the bias remains. That stance which looks askance at the...