To Catch a Light-Filled Vision: American Studies and the Activation of Radical Traditions

We are gathered on land first inhabited by the Cherokees and the Muscogee Creeks. We pay respect to elders past and present and to the ancestors who labored for us and who watch over us. Ashe.

I bring you greetings from Barbara Ransby down the street. She sends this message to us: “The 2018 ASA program is exciting, provocative and generative. Please know that we have been inspired by your theme of Emergence. In parallel time, under the rubric of ‘Just Imagine, Imagining Justice,’ we will be discussing, debating and wrestling with some of the very same issues as you. Daily news headlines remind us that we live in dire and unstable times, replete with danger and ripe with possibilities. Let’s accept the challenge and do the work. We all have an important role to play in imagining and fighting for a truly feminist future.”

Thank you, Scott, for that introduction. My long-standing love and thanks go to my friend LeAnne Howe for her writing and for saying yes to being our artist-in-residence. I would like to thank my wonderful and committed program and site resources committee, particularly the co-chairs—Avery Gordon, Rebecca Hill, Grace Hong, and Junaid Rana. I also want to acknowledge the steadfast commitment of our graduate assistants, particularly Molly Benitez, who took the utmost care of the program committee’s needs and visions. My appreciation goes to Christine Busiek of INMEX, our meeting planning company. Our assistant director, Deborah Kimmey, has taken the ASA into her mind and her heart. We’re so lucky to have her as a part of this association. Last but not least, Dr. John Stephens, who loves this association most of all. No one is more committed to this organization than John, who has been yoked to it for thirty years and more. What we have here in the association is, to a large degree, the outcome of John’s vision and protection. There are not enough thank yous.

As many of you know, I am at home. And the circumstances compel a presidential address that gives you a sense of how this region launched me. So what I have prepared is my version of two of my favorite texts that have traveled with me since my days as a teenager—Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road and Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings.

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In our house on 615 Bridge Street in Manchester, Georgia—about an hour and fifteen minutes from Atlanta, going south on 85—my brothers and I grew up to the sound of Mama’s singing. Daddy said that Mama patterned her life after Aretha Franklin. In fact, people came from out of town to hear Mama sing. Like Aretha, Mama created sounds and pictures with her voice—hills and mountains traveled over, storms that were the settings for toiling and waiting, baptisms in the Jordan River (“Everybody shouting; nobody doubting!”), and bells that rang and rang. I learned very early on that Mama’s voice was part of the general creativity of the black communities in Manchester and in the other black communities that made up Meriwether County. It was my appreciation of this general creativity among these everyday people that made me image-, sound-, and time-minded as a writer and scholar. It also marked the rural as a site of heterogeneous temporalities and spaces, temporalities and spaces that even the most vaunted intellectual formations have strained to appreciate and acknowledge.

In 1870 the black woman intellectual and writer Frances Ellen Watkins Harper wrote a letter to her friend, the former abolitionist and writer William Still from Greenville, Georgia, in west-central Georgia. Greenville is in the northern end of Meriwether County, just a twenty-minute ride from where I grew up in Manchester, which is in the southern end of the county. In her letter to Still, Harper wrote,

Part of my lectures are given privately to women, and for them I never make any charge, or take any collection. But this part of...