“I was always really interested in migration and movement—why people move and what happens when they move and how they form community,” said Maddox, an associate professor in the African & African-American Studies department.

In her new book, A Home Away from Home: Mutual Aid, Political Activism, and Caribbean American Identity (University of Pennsylvania Press), Maddox explores those ideas, as well as the influence of organizations that supported Caribbean immigrants as they arrived in the U.S. around the early 1900s.

How did you come up with the idea for A Home Away from Home?

I knew that I wanted to work on some aspect of immigration or migration history for my Ph.D. [which she earned in 2016]. I started going to the Schomburg Center [for Research in Black Culture]in Harlem, and I found these records of Caribbean-American mutual aid societies. There were so many of them. I thought, “They’re really important. We should be talking about this.”

What did you learn from studying these mutual aid societies?

I realized that the societies were important for lots of reasons: helping migrants form community with each other and taking care of them in a time where there weren’t many outlets for Black immigrants.This is when we have a lot of segregationist laws in the U.S. toward Black people … and they’re not OK with that. They become really politically active. They’re fighting against anti-lynching laws. They’re fighting for better living conditions within New York City, better education. This is also the time where we have a lot of xenophobic immigration laws.

What were some of the surprising parts of your research?

[These immigrants] are also still heavily involved in the politics of home—the political climate of the Caribbean, and what’s happening there. Globally, they’re also really invested in what’s happening in Africa. One of the key points that I look at is 1935 when Italy invaded Ethiopia; at this time, Ethiopia is the only country on the African continent that’s not colonized by European power. The whole African diaspora and all Black people around the world are looking at Ethiopia. And so these groups are raising money to send to Ethiopian troops. They’re sending supplies there. Some people are actually going to fight for the Ethiopian army. So not only are they invested in what was happening where they are, but they see themselves connected to Black people throughout the world.

How did you see those connections form through your research?

One of the things that I was really interested in is how Black identity is formed—even with my own family, we’re all Black, but there were differences. So how did they become Caribbean, because they start off as someone from Antigua or Jamaica, but then they become Caribbean in the U.S. At the same time, they’re also becoming Black, and they’re becoming African American. They’re living in the same neighborhoods with African American people, they’re in the same job positions.

What do you hope people take away from reading your book?

There aren’t a lot of books that study this early period of Caribbean immigration. We tend to talk about the period after 1960 when there’s this boom of migrants, but I’m really interested to show that there are Caribbean immigrants who were coming prior to that, who are part of the fabric of New York City history, of U.S. history. I’m excited this book is coming out during Black History Month, because we don’t always talk about Black migrants as part of that history. But they are. For instance—no one ever talks about Malcolm X’s Caribbean heritage and what that meant for him as a Black political leader in the U.S. I’m hoping that this helps people feel seen and represented in ways that they hadn’t been before.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

In her talk, “Critical Race Theory: An Introduction,” Bridges presented the history of the academic concept that has been in the news recently and addressed the misinformation circling the topic. 

Critical race theory (CRT) began in the 1970s when scholars reflected on the state of Black Americans after the Civil Rights Movement, said Bridges, a law professor at the UC Berkeley, where she specializes in race and gender in the law. Civil rights law abolished discrimination, racial segregation, and disenfranchisement, yet the Black community was at the bottom of social well-being. The resulting intellectual movement, she said, designated racism as systemic and embedded in America’s legal policies and systems.

Today, she said, the term is misunderstood and misused. 

“Critical race theory has become a floating signifier and has expanded to refer to any progressive thought about race,” said Bridges, who published Critical Race Theory: A Primer (Concepts and Insights) in 2019. “This means that all progressive thought about race is at risk of being censored. I may not even be able to give today’s lecture in a couple of years. While I can still talk about it, let me take advantage of this.”

Critical Race Theory in the News

After the social reckoning that resulted from George Floyd and Breonna Taylor’s deaths in the summer of 2020, Bridges said, CRT became caught in the crosshairs of conservative activists, led by Christopher F. Rufo of the conservative Manhattan Institute think tank. He claimed that the federal government was teaching CRT to its employees. After Rufo appeared on Fox News, the Trump administration tapped him to co-write an executive order prohibiting training funded with federal money that is “rooted in the pernicious and false belief that America is an irredeemably racist and sexist country,” Bridges said, quoting the order.

Bridges also talked about CRT being banned in Florida schools, as well as the College Board recently removing CRT, along with Black feminism, Black queer thoughts and theory, and the Black Lives Matter social movement, from the curriculum of AP classes. 

Bridges described CRT as an intellectual movement—a body of scholarship and an analytical tool set for examining how law and racial inequality are interconnected.

“Unfortunately, critical race theory has become a term that references not a distinct legal literature, but rather a brand category that is intended to capture everything that is unpopular with Americans,” said Bridges.

Sophia Henderson, a senior majoring in Film & Television and New Media & Digital Design who attended the lecture, said that point made an impact on her.

“It really hit home for me when Bridges connected critical race theory to brand category and how conservatives changed CRT’s definition,” she said. “I could see how changing the definition is possible and how powerfully it can affect the public’s perception.”

Analyzing Racist Acts through a CRT Lens 

Bridges went on to discuss the differences between racism and CRT. On the screen flashed pictures of George Floyd and Eric Garner, two Black men who were killed by police officers. 

Under the CRT lens, aside from asking whether those officers acted out of racism, more questions need to be asked, she said. What led these Black men to commit non-violent, white-collar crimes? Floyd allegedly tried to use a counterfeit 20-dollar bill at a convenience store, and Garner was suspected of selling loose cigarettes. What circumstances did these two men face that it made sense for them to do these things? Why did they have the health issues they had—heart problems for Floyd and asthma for Garner?

The traditional definition of racism would look at the bad actors, in this case, the officers, and assume that once they are removed from their positions, everything would be solved, she said. But under CRT’s lens, more structural changes would be needed–like providing financial opportunities and a safety net for people of color, analyzing their environments and making their neighborhoods more healthy, and even providing nutritious food and other interventions to counteract systemic racism. 

Tyesha Maddox, an assistant professor at the Department of African and African American Studies and the event’s organizer, said the lecture  solidified her ideas “of exactly what critical race theory is in a very simple way.” Maddox first learned about Bridges on Instagram and knew that she would be the right speaker to tackle the topic for the Black History Month event. “It will make it easy for me to explain to my students, and even family members, what critical race theory is today,” Maddox said.

Reclaiming CRT: The Stakes Are High

CRT has existed over the past 40 years but has been a target of conservative activists since they “discovered” it in 2020, Bridges said. She shared that she thinks conservative activists will move on to the next “boogeyman” if this doesn’t win them an election. Until then, she said, they will still claim the term and society will have to wait to reclaim CRT in its correct form. 

“The fight against CRT is truly the fight of our lives,” said Bridges. “The stakes are so incredibly high.”

Written by: Bernadette Young

“I’m particularly happy to be here with you, for those of you who are first-year students, so that we can go through this together—this moving to this cold place with strange food,” joked Tetlow, a longtime New Orleans resident who officially joined the Fordham community on July 1.

The students got an opportunity to mingle not only with each other and the new president but also with Armando Nuñez Jr., GABELLI ’82, chair-elect of Fordham’s Board of Trustees, and some prominent alumni from their native island, including Fordham trustee Gualberto J. Rodríguez-Feliciano, FCRH ’95, and Mario Porrata-Nieva, FCRH ’91.

John Buckley, GSE ’89, vice president for enrollment, said that in recent years, the number of first-year students from Puerto Rico has been steadily increasing. This fall, Fordham welcomed a “record-breaking” 17 students from the island. He credited the alumni for helping to spread the word about the value of a Fordham education and the difference it has made in their lives.

Finding a ‘Community of People Who Understand’ You

Cristina Flores, a Fordham junior from Dorado, a town on the northern coast of Puerto Rico, said she initially enrolled at a college in Philadelphia with her twin sister. After a year and a half, however, she didn’t feel at home there, so she transferred to Fordham’s Gabelli School of Business as a sophomore last spring.

“When I came here, I feel like I was able to find those people who do their thing, and I do mine, but at the same time have that community of people who understand me as a person,” said Flores, who is majoring in global business, with a concentration in global marketing with consumer insights.

She added that, while she misses “her other half,” she is glad she decided to transfer. And she isn’t without family in New York: On Sundays, she goes to church with her older sister, who also lives in the city. On campus, she’s involved with the FCLC Yoga and Mindfulness Club and is hoping to start a new club for students like her.

“We’re still trying to find people who want to join, but we want to be able to have that community for people who transfer from other colleges or are international students like myself,” she said.

Javier Méndez Lacomba, a first-year student from San Juan studying business administration with a double concentration in business economics and global business, said he was attracted by the University’s strong extracurriculars, including El Grito de Lares.

Founded more than 50 years ago, the student club successfully advocated for changes to the Fordham curriculum to reflect the growing diversity of students on campus in the late 1960s. The University launched a Puerto Rican studies program in fall 1970, one year after launching what would become the Department of African and African American Studies. In the mid-1990s, the Puerto Rican studies program expanded and changed its name to the Latin American and Latino Studies Institute. Today, El Grito de Lares offers Hispanic students a safe place to discuss their heritage and shared experiences.

Even with that, Lacomba said the transition to college life is not without its challenges, such as trying to connect with people who “perhaps don’t share the same interests or are from different social and political backgrounds.” While it doesn’t always go as fluidly as he would like, he said Fordham’s faculty and administration offer “the best resources” to help him and others connect with their fellow students.

Community, Connection, and Resilience

The idea of taking advantage of Fordham’s resources for academic and social support was one echoed by Rodríguez-Feliciano, an entrepreneur and co-founder of Nutriendo PR. During an emotional speech, the Fordham trustee recalled his days as an undergraduate in the 1990s and encouraged students prioritize their mental health and ask for help if they need it.

“I remember how strange it was: the temperature, the smells, the faces, the sounds, the sunsets, the mornings, the food, the music, the culture—so different,” he said, recalling what it felt like to move from Puerto Rico to New York City. “This institution cares about you specifically: you, your name. Let the system know, let people know that you’re having a hard time, and you’re going to get a beautiful response.

“I had that experience in sophomore year, when I was against the wall, and my theology professor was there for me,” said Rodríguez-Feliciano, who earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and political science from Fordham in 1995 and received a prestigious Harry S. Truman Scholarship, which he used to get an M.B.A. from Yale University. “I didn’t know I was being supported the whole time [at Fordham], but if I don’t open up, they can’t respond.”

During the event, Tetlow also spoke about the sense of resilience and community that she feels she shares with people from Puerto Rico, touching on the devastation Hurricane Fiona wrought in September.

“I lived through [Hurricane]  Katrina where my friends died, where I had to rescue my family with a friend on a boat, where [I had]  that sense of wondering if anyone cares … and months that turned into years of anguish and rebuilding and slogging effort only to face it again,” she said. “I say that not to remind you of that pain but to [let you]  know … that this experience that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy is also a fundamental part of who I am.”

“I see that strength in you,” she added. “So, I hope that I’ll see you on campus, that we’ll give each other that look that we know each other, and that we will learn this city together.”

“This talk comes out of having—after a year and a half of lockdown, terror, and isolation—the opportunity to encounter the work of Black artists that I was not familiar with, and to be able to encounter it in ways that made the spaces of their exhibition much clearer and more fraught to me,” Campt said in the Feb. 3 webinar. 

Campt is a professor at Brown University and a Black feminist therorist. She has authored five books, including the newly released A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See (The MIT Press, 2021), which explores the work of contemporary Black artists. Her webinar explored the work of three Black artists that were not included in her newest book: Maxwell Alexandre, Troy Monches-Michie, and Jennifer Packer. Through different mediums, their artwork collectively probes different parts of the Black identity—including masculinity, queer desire, and vulnerability—and establishes critical dialogue in the largely white art world, said Campt. 

She recalled her recent visit to Maxwell Alexandre’s New Power exhibit at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, France, which features paintings of Black and brown people in scenes of everyday life. As museum visitors contemplate the illustrated people, the figures in the paintings also observe their real-life onlookers. While viewing the artwork, Campt arrived at an uncomfortable realization. 

“In their gallery, all the visitors are Black. In mine, I am the only non-white spectator for the two hours I spend in the space. It’s a contrast I’ve internalized as normal—an expectation of being out of place that usually overtakes me as I approach the counter of a museum. It is equally palpable when I pass the threshold of a gallery and am met with stares or a complete lack of acknowledgement from blasé gallery staff who fail to look up from their counters,” Campt said. “New Power upends the dynamics of being out of place by recentering those often neglected and relegated to this position.”

Alexandre’s art revealed something else to Campt. As she walked around the gallery, she saw Black security guards—both the illustrated and real-life versions. When a lively group of young people arrived at the gallery, she noticed a Black security guard who closely monitored them. 

“Watching the guard as he shadowed them while moving through the gallery, I was struck by the fact that the art gallery is one of the few places where Black folks, often armed, are permitted to actively surveil white audiences,” Campt said. “What do the guards think of encountering their painted simulacra in spaces where they are usually overlooked or made invisible? … Sadly, both my French and my nerves failed to let me pose these questions. But it’s nevertheless one of the central questions posed by Alexander and articulated unequivocally in New Power … How might we lay claim to these spaces in ways that refuse not only a white gaze of consumption or exploitation, but instead initiate moans of reclamation and redress?” 

In a Q&A with the audience, Campt explained her creative process every time she encounters new art. In addition to considering the artwork, she observes the actual space surrounding the piece, the sounds of the gallery, and the people within the room, and then records her observations on an iPad. 

What’s most important is not what we literally see in the moment, but how we respond to the artwork, she said. 

“When I say that I’m writing to images, I’m writing from that response that they are soliciting from me. And in doing that, I’m trying to create a dialogue,” she said. 

At the end of the webinar, moderator Brandy Monk-Payton, Ph.D., assistant professor of communication and media studies, said she observed in Campt’s work “this kind of insistence on the local, the intimate, and the interior as a way to sort of remain vigilant in some respects.”

“I’m wondering how we can sort of remain vigilant in supporting understanding of a Black gaze in this moment, this proliferation of wonderful media makers, creatives,” Monk-Payton said.

Campt said that the key to vigilance is discomfort. 

“What I’m talking about in terms of a ‘Black gaze’ is art that makes us feel uncomfortable. Artwork that makes us work. Not artwork that’s good, per se, but artwork that’s good because it’s hard,” Campt said. “How easy is this? How comfortable do I feel with that? And what does it mean to question that comfort?” 

This event was co-sponsored by the Arts and Sciences Council, the Division of Mission Integration and Ministry, and the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer.

“Jonathon was a caring and compassionate educator who had the kind of multilayered career that one can only marvel at,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, in an email to the University community. “He was thoughtful and creative, with a talent for drawing connections among disciplines.” 

Appels taught in Fordham’s English, African and African American studies, anthropology, dance, history, communication and media studies, Middle East studies, theology, and visual arts departments, as well as the religious studies, comparative literature, and urban studies programs, from 1996 to 2002 and 2009 to 2021. He offered a colorful mix of courses, including “Madness and Literature” and “LGBT Arts and Spirituality: Mystics and Creators,” mostly at the Lincoln Center campus. 

“His mind was eclectic and his education and curiosity was unmatched,” said Anne Fernald, Ph.D., professor of English and women, gender, and sexuality studies. “Endlessly curious, he always had a new story of the latest lecture or performance he had attended. He was a wonderful storyteller, with a rich laugh. He took me out to a vegan restaurant once, hoping to encourage me in more healthy habits. He was always cold and wandered the halls draped in wonderful scarves.”

Appels was a scholar, poet, musician, sculptor, and art critic who conducted research in 20 countries, largely in Europe; he was also a member of nine humanities associations. 

“He had a very probing mind, and he was very good at connecting the dots between various disciplines and departments,” said his husband, David LaMarche. “He was a very animated and inquisitive person with strong opinions, but not rigid … a free spirit and sort of counterculture, since the time that we were born in, the early sixties, and a sensitive man who loved every branch of the arts.”

His First Love

But what most academics weren’t aware of, said his husband, was his love for dance.  

“He loved teaching, but his first love was probably choreography,” LaMarche said. 

Appels was a dancer and choreographer who founded his own dance company, Company Appels, in 1979. He performed across the country and the world, from the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City to international stages in France, Germany, and Portugal. He choreographed modern dances for scores of performers, principally graduates of the Juilliard School, SUNY Purchase, and North Carolina School of the Arts. One of his favorite courses he taught at Fordham was part of the Ailey/Fordham BFA Program in Dance, run jointly with the Ailey School, said his husband. Even off stage at more casual venues, you could find him dancing.

“He loved disco dancing and he loved to dance, even into his sixties. If we ever went to a gala party or something like that, he’d always be on the dance floor, wild,” said LaMarche, a pianist who first met Appels at a dance class in San Francisco. 

Appels’ passion for the arts was recognized worldwide. In 1998, he was awarded a Fulbright to teach modern dance at the National Dance Academy in Hungary. (He received another Fulbright to study the archives of a famous philosopher in Belgium in 1991.) In addition, he received an artist fellowship from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts and a William Como Award from the New York Foundation for the Arts. 

In a 2014 reflection, a Fordham alumnus praised Appels for showing him the beauty of dancing through his course called Lincoln Center Arts. 

“I never considered dance to be very interesting, running the other way when friends would suggest going to the ballet … I now found myself discussing Balanchine, Paul Taylor, and Dance Theater of Harlem with anyone who would listen,” wrote Jason McDonald, who took the course as a Ph.D. student.

‘Now Keep That Big Smile’ 

Appels was a thoughtful instructor who wanted his students to take away something meaningful from his classes, said Thomas O’Donnell, Ph.D., co-chair of Fordham’s comparative literature program and associate professor of English and medieval studies. 

“Jon really wanted his students to become exposed to very different ideas. He was a very curious and open-minded person, and it seemed that his lessons as a result were full of that same spirit,” O’Donnell said. “He cared about his students very deeply. For every student that I would talk to him about, he had some story or insight about their biography and who they were. He really wanted to get to know the students so he could help them better.”

He loved speaking with students about their work over the phone, said LaMarche. Before their calls ended, he left them with a unique message. 

“He ended almost every phone call with a student by saying, ‘Now keep that big smile,’ which I thought was so cute,” LaMarche said, chuckling. “You can’t see someone smile over the phone, but he would always say that to them.” 

An ‘Off-the-Grid Educational Experience’ 

Appels was born on May 17, 1954, in Falfurrias, Texas. His father, Robert C. Robinson, was a sales executive for oil companies and a financial planner; his mother, Patricia Robinson, neé Hosley, was an elementary school teacher. When he was a child, his family frequently moved because of the nature of his father’s job, said LaMarche. He lived in Nigeria and Libya and later settled in California. 

“He was exposed to a lot of different cultures as a youngster … He got his B.A. at Western Washington University at a college called Fairhaven College, which was a very experimental educational institution at that time,” said LaMarche. “That started his off-the grid educational experience.”

Appels earned a bachelor’s degree in art and society from Western Washington University, a master’s degree in music from Mills College, a master’s degree in poetry from Antioch University, and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the City University of New York. 

Outside of Fordham, he taught undergraduate and graduate students at Columbia University, Cornell University, Princeton University, Rutgers University, and his alma mater Western Washington University. He enjoyed yoga, pilates, gyrotonics, acupuncture, and other forms of Eastern medicine and healing. Instead of ironing his shirts and wearing a suit jacket like many professors, he preferred a loose and casual style, LaMarche said. He was a spiritual man who loved nature, especially walks through the woods and summers spent with LaMarche in Ithaca, where they swam in waterfalls, gorges, and lakes. He disliked technology, especially computers—in fact, he never owned one, said LaMarche, who managed his husband’s online accounts.  

In addition to LaMarche, Appels is survived by his father, Robert; brother, Robert H. Robinson and his partner, Ilona Robinson; and his sister, Carol House, her husband Roger House, and their son Josiah. A memorial service will be held for Appels sometime early next year, said LaMarche.

“For some people it did work out; for some people, it did not,” said Stovall, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, during the June 17 panel discussion offered as part of the virtual 2021 Block Party reunion for the Lincoln Center campus.

Rafael Zapata, Fordham’s chief diversity officer, moderated the discussion of Juneteenth, which marks the date—June 19, 1865—when the abolition of slavery was completed with the arrival of Union troops at Galveston, Texas, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation.

The discussion ranged from the history of Juneteenth celebrations to the emancipation process in Caribbean nations to the aftermath of slavery’s abolition in the U.S.

Liberation “was something that Black people fought for themselves; they weren’t just sort of waiting around for it to happen for them,” said Stovall, author of White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea (Princeton University Press, 2021). The Civil War saw the largest slave revolts in American history, as well as “massive mobilization” of formerly enslaved people to serve in the Union armies, he said. But promises of the land that former slaves needed to establish their own farming livelihoods fell through, for the most part, forcing them into sharecropping, a form of pseudo-slavery in which they were “under the thumb of their former masters,” he said.

One of the panelists, Tyesha Maddox, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Fordham Department of African and African American Studies, described how many formerly enslaved people turned to benevolent associations or mutual aid organizations “in which they came together [and]pooled their resources of money in order to take care of themselves in the ways that the government was not providing help for them.”

“We see a similar thing happening post-emancipation in the Caribbean, where these people are trying to … make lives for themselves and not just survive post-emancipation, but thrive, and set up communities for themselves and live as equal citizens,” she said.

The Struggle in the Caribbean

Panelists described a fitful abolition of slavery throughout Caribbean nations, with freedom often seeming precarious. As in the United States, many slaveowners in these nations still continued with slavery months or years after it was abolished “so that they can continue with this free manual labor,” Maddox said.

Stovall noted that Haiti was isolated and made to suffer after achieving its independence in an 1804 revolution that abolished slavery. The government had to pay reparations to the French for the seizure of slaveowners’ property, and it wasn’t until the early 21st century that France finally abolished all duties on Haiti stemming from its revolution, he said.

In Guadeloupe, slavery was abolished for only about a decade before it was reestablished under Napoleon, and during World War II there were rumors that France’s Vichy government would bring slavery back to the Caribbean, he said. “There was always this sense that … you couldn’t rely on [freedom],” he said.

The Growth of African American Communities

Another panelist, Michele Prettyman, a scholar of African American cinema and visual and popular culture in the Fordham communication and media studies department, noted the wave of Black elected officials in the U.S. following the Civil War as well as the growth of African American communities—like the one ravaged during the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.

“Tulsa is … the most striking embodiment of what happens as a result of this incredible wave of business and leadership and education,” she said. At the same time, “even killing people in a very literal sense did not destroy this animating impulse of Black life that comes out of these moments of just real despair and real darkness and … just tremendous odds and obstacles,” she said.

Later, asked how the idea of freedom is expressed in Black creativity, she said it is not just under the purview of historians. “If we keep it in our poetry and our art and our music and our culture, it becomes something that is owned and shared, and not just something that’s commemorated on single days or in single moments,” she said. “It should be a part of all of our lives, intimately, and how we legislate, how we vote, how we commemorate.”

Democracy for All?

Asked by Zapata about the current “assault on voting rights” in the U.S., Stovall said that “there’s a real lack of respect for the very idea of democracy.”

“Even though you have, of course, the rejection of this being in any way racially characterized … it is really hard to escape the impression that if Black people were not able to vote, a lot of conservative white people would be a whole lot happier,” he said.

Stovall said the federal government’s creation of a Juneteenth holiday “has all come together really fast,” but also pointed out state legislatures’ recent moves to prevent school districts “from teaching the idea that racism is an intrinsic part of American history.”

“So how you can hold these two concepts together at the same time is frankly beyond me,” he said, “because if you acknowledge the role of slavery to the extent that you have a national holiday to celebrate its abolition, that says something very profound about American history, and so I think this is a country that’s still very much struggling with how do you deal with these different concepts.”

Stovall ended the event by turning his computer to show a lit lamp that was owned by his great-great-grandmother, who was born a slave. “The lamp still shines,” he said. “Our history still shines. And I think Juneteenth represents the fact that our experience as a whole still shines, down to the present day, and will shine in the future.”

Among the books that she penned before retiring in 1986 were The Ghanaian Factory Worker: Industrial Man in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 1972) and Cities and Suburbs: Urban Life in West Africa (Africana Publishing, 1981).

Her legacy also includes a bequest for her alma mater that will be used to establish a new distinguished chair in African and African American Studies.

The Margaret Peil Distinguished Chair will be open to scholars of any field—such as political science, history, cultural studies, literature, or sociology—who are devoted to the area of African and African American Studies, said Eva Badowska, Ph.D., dean of the faculty of arts and sciences and associate vice president for arts and sciences. Peil’s generosity will help the University strengthen its commitment to the work of anti-racism, she said.

“It’s about making visible the University’s commitment to developing leaders in social justice, of which racial justice is an extremely prominent part. It’s very urgent and timely,” she said.

The chair is unique both because of the source of its funding and what the University hopes its holder will achieve. Peil was a native of Racine, Wisconsin, who was described in her obituary as a devout Catholic who attended Mass every day. In her lifetime, she visited well over 100 countries, from Bhutan to New Zealand, and she was so enamored with Africa that she tended a lush garden shaped like the continent that she opened up to the public for 20 years.

Amir Idris, Ph.D., who has served as chair of Fordham’s Department of African and African American Studies for the past eight years, said he likewise hoped the holder of the chair would embrace a global perspective on helping advance the cause of African and African American Studies around the world.

“I expect the person who will be hired will not only produce his or her own research and create research initiatives in the University, but also play a leadership role as well,” he said.

“We are living in a transformative movement, and we need transformative actions. I think it’s a good step in the right direction,” he said, noting that he looks forward to beginning “the hard work of translating the endowed chair into reality to fulfill our mission and the mission of the University.”

Badowska echoed the sentiment. Rather than focus on the specific trajectory of intellectual academic inquiry in a narrow field, she said she hopes the recipient would aim to have a grander, institutional impact.

“This is an opportunity to build on Dr. Peil’s vision in support of the University’s mission to form future citizens while emphasizing the anti-racism and social justice commitments that are at the heart of the institution’s formation of its students,” she said.

“They’re from Grenada and some of them were living there during the revolution. Others were living in the diaspora in Toronto,” she said. “And it was always kind of a part of our history that I didn’t always understand. My family would say that the revolution was a good thing. But then I would also hear them say that the U.S. invasion [to end the revolution]was a good thing, and that it had sort of saved the country. So I grew up being interested in those conversations.”

Lambert, now an associate professor of African and African American Studies at Fordham, said that interest stayed with her through graduate school and into her work today, which is why she decided to research and write Comrade Sister: Caribbean Feminist Revisions of the Grenada Revolution (June 2020, University of Virginia Press).

“I got really into reading the creative literature around this revolution —I was training as a literary scholar—and the major writers of this revolution were women,” she said.

Understanding the Revolution Through Literature

Lambert recalled reading works by Merle Collins, a poet, novelist, and scholar, and Dionne Brand, a poet, novelist, and essayist, who told stories of everyday women during this time through nonfiction, poetry, essays, and novels.

“What an interesting way to understand a political context–by having characters who are everyday folks in their villages, in their towns, and focusing on their relationships, but having the politics play out in the background and showing what kind of effect the politics had on the lives of women,” she said.

However, as she began diving into the official archives of the Grenada Revolution, she noticed “women were absent, in some ways.”

In Comrade Sister, Lambert said, she tried to explore the revolution and the emotions and experiences women faced at the time to provide a detailed look at how gender and sexuality produced different narratives. One theme that came through in many of the works she studied was this feeling of resilience from the women, despite the uncertainties and challenges.

For Women, a Way to Look Beyond

“I found that this was really a literature also about a particular resilience that women had– working class women, rural women—and the fact that they are able to survive this,” she said. “And I think some of it has to do with the fact that even though they saw a lot of the benefits of the revolution, they understood that they were not the target constituents of that revolution because of their gender. So they don’t put all of their hopes into it … whereas with some of the male writers that I looked at, I found that there was either a total refusal of the revolution, or an over identification with it, so that when it ended violently, they are kind of stuck. For the women writers, there was always a way to look beyond it, a way to start again.”

She also was able to highlight the stories of women who made a difference both during and after the revolution, such as Joan Purcell, a Grenadian politician who spared the lives of the revolutionaries who were sentenced to death. Purcell was asked to review the verdicts and decided to commute their sentences to prevent another cycle of political violence, Lambert said.

“She looks at the situation, but she also looks at Grenadian society, and as a member of that society, determines that it would be another experience of trauma all over again if these people were going to be hanged,” Lambert said.

Lambert said this book ties into her classes at Fordham, which include a Black feminism course and a Caribbean literature class.

“It’s actually been really nice to have an ongoing dialogue between my research and my teaching and also to expose my students to some of this literature and some of this history,” she said

Broadening Freedom and Slavery Studies

Lambert participated in a conversation on her book on Monday, October 26, which was sponsored in part by the Fordham Working Group on Freedom and Slavery, a group of faculty and graduate students she helped co-found last year with Yuko Miki, Ph.D., associate professor of history and associate director of Latin American and Latinx Studies.

“We’re interested in thinking broadly about the archives and poetics and politics of freedom and slavery. So last year, we were thinking more narrowly about the Transatlantic Slave Trade and freedom, and we had a great opportunity to talk about the 1619 project [from The New York Times],” Lambert said. “This year, we decided we wanted to really kind of expand what we were doing so—the group is still on freedom and slavery—but we really wanted to think about freedom in terms of Black studies more broadly, so we’re not just looking at the period of slavery. It really becomes a space to think about new directions and Black studies, to think about freedom and slavery studies, but also to think about all of the ways in which we define freedoms in Black studies.”

Those were the opening words of this year’s annual Black History Month lecture delivered by Saidiya Hartman, Ph.D., professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, at the Lincoln Center campus on Feb. 21. 

Jim and Julia

Hartman was reflecting on a short science fiction story by W.E.B. Du Bois and its implications on white supremacy as she began her talk, titled “Wild Thoughts and Rumors about the Auspicious Era of Extensive Freedom, or A Speculative History of the Demise of White Supremacy.” 

The words described Jim Davis, a black bank messenger, in Du Bois’ short story, The Comet. In Jim’s world, society is still segregated by race. After a comet hits New York and expels toxic gases that seem to have killed everyone around him, Jim finds a wealthy white woman named Julia. Thinking that they are the only humans left in the world, they start to connect and see past the color of each other’s skin. But at the end of the story, they discover there are more survivors. Julia’s father and fiancé find her, and she leaves Jim to join them, while an unnamed black woman holding a baby’s corpse falls into Jim’s embrace. 

To Hartman, a 2019 recipient of the MacArthur “genius” grant, The Comet is Du Bois’ attempt to explore the possibility of overturning white supremacy in a post-apocalyptic world. It’s a “tale about interracial love—less what happened to it than a question or doubt about the circumstances in which it might be possible or permitted,” she said. 

“One of the things you see in Du Bois is always attempting to imagine what’s going to allow an opening for a new arrangement to emerge or for abolition and democracy to in fact be realized,” Hartman said in Lowenstein’s 12th-floor lounge to an audience of roughly 100 guests, the majority of them students.

Du Bois, a leading scholar and civil rights activist in the first half of the 20th century, wrote The Comet—an example of speculative fiction focused on black society—“in the hope that I may strike here and there a half-tone, newer even if slighter, up from the heart of my problem and the problems of my people,” he wrote in the story’s postscript. The story, part of Du Bois’ book Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, is an old tale published in 1920, but its themes still resonate in modern media, Hartman said

“For those of you tempted to dismiss Du Bois and the comet as antiquated, as a variant of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, staged against the backdrop of climate catastrophe, I would encourage you to keep in mind contemporary films like Get Out or Bird Box, which also speculate about post-racial futures and end-of-the-world scenarios at the site of interracial love and intimacy,” Hartman said. “The coupling of black men and white women raises the question and possibility of a new race of people, in terms that might redress racial subjection and sexual violence, rather than reproduce it.” 

‘The Crime That Du Bois Swears Can Never Be Pardoned’

At the end of the story, white supremacy continues to reign. In this world, “the white world, the world of man,” it is the black woman who has suffered the most, said Hartman. 

“The history of insult and degradation, Du Bois notes, weighs most heavily on her shoulders. Her maternity is negated and exploited as a vehicle for the production of capital,” Hartman said. “She lives or dies at the white man’s whim and pleasure, a sentient tool and a property for enjoyment in every way imaginable. The harm the world has done to her has been so great and its violence so unrelenting, so seemingly irreparable, that it is the crime that Du Bois swears can never be pardoned.” 

She recalled the mysterious black woman carrying a dead infant at the end of The Comet.

“The damage done to the black’s reputation as human is most severe in her case. Given this, it is not surprising that she is unable to secure a place in the world for her children, or make this unlivable state habitable for the ones she loves, or create minimal conditions for survival, or ensure her future or anyone else’s,” Hartman said. 

Midway through the lecture, she looked up from her notes and scanned the audience. 

“I know this is all very heavy,” Hartman said. “But it is timely.” 

A Lesson on White Supremacy

In the final moments of her lecture, Hartman reflected on white supremacy in the past and present, in a commentary that intertwined Du Bois’ thoughts with her own. 

White workers and ex-slaves shared a common enemy: plantation owners and northern industrial capital, Hartman said. But that commonality failed to lead to interracial solidarity or retaliation. The white working class cared more about “the processes of racial enchantment and the possessive investment in whiteness.” They identified more with their white masters and rulers, she said, although they were separated by socioeconomic status. 

“This irrational and deep psychic investment in whiteness prevented—and we might add, continues to prevent—any recognition of a shared state or partial commonness with black people,” Hartman said. 

The lecture was sponsored by the Department of African & African American Studies, the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer; the Center on Race, Law and Justice; Department of Communication and Media Studies; Department of English; Comparative Literature Program; and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. The event was also part of the Women of Color Initiative at Fordham launched in 2018, which encourages women of color to engage in conversation with one another. 

“Some of you might be familiar with the joke about Dominicans as those black people who don’t know or think they’re black,” Ramírez said to a group of Fordham students and staff in Lowenstein’s South Lounge. “My book Colonial Phantoms shows both why this has come to be and why there’s a problem that it’s the primary way in which Dominicans are discussed in various conversations with the U.S., the Caribbean, and beyond.” 

Her talk, which took place during National Hispanic Heritage Month, was part of a Fordham lecture series about Hispanic Caribbean women writers who examine the intersection of race, gender, and imperialism in their work. The series is sponsored by the Office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences; the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures; the Center on Race, Law, and Justice; the department of African and African American studies; the Latin American and Latinx Studies Institute; and the Comparative Literature program. 

In a presentation that mixed music with academia, Ramírez spoke about her award-winning book, Colonial Phantoms: Belonging and Refusal in the Dominican Americas, from the 19th Century to the Present, published by New York University Press last year. The book details how decades of literature, music, and speech show Dominicans’ ambivalent relationship toward blackness, thanks to its unique racial history: Unlike many nations in the Americas and the Western World, the Dominican Republic, for centuries, had a majority mixed-race and black population that was free. For years, Dominicans have tried to distinguish themselves from the New World narratives that have “ghosted, misunderstood, or acknowledged them only as inferior others” through creative outlets, she said.

One example is the music video “El Tigeraso” by Maluca Mala, an Afro-Dominican artist born and raised in New York City. The song opens with Maluca Mala sitting in “a quintessential Dominican site—the hair salon,”  said Ramírez. To many U.S. scholars, her decision to go to a salon to straighten her hair represents a Dominican’s denial of his or her blackness, said Ramírez. But when Maluca Mala leaves the salon, she keeps the rollers in her hair. In other words, she demonstrates “an ambivalent kind of black performance that is neither outright denial [of blackness]  nor the kind of celebration we expect in the U.S.” 

“She is neither wholeheartedly embracing Dominican women’s hair-straightening practices, rooted of course in the racist notion that black hair is bad, nor is she rejecting the practice of going to the salon by wearing her hair in natural curls. Instead, she stops the process midway,” Ramírez explained. “Her embrace of the rollers is a complicated embodiment of both African diasporic and diasporic Dominican subjectivity.” 

In a Q&A session, Ramírez spoke about what motivated her to study the relationship between race and Dominicans. 

“It might seem like the obvious answer is because I’m Dominican. But actually, my major in college was Japanese literature,” she said, to laughter from the audience. She was born in Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, and raised in the Bronx. But it wasn’t until graduate school that she became fascinated by the history of her homeland and the Caribbean. 

Sitting in the audience was Yuko Miki, Ph.D., associate professor of history at Fordham, a fellow Brown alumna who studies Brazilian history.

“I’m a historian of slavery, too,” Miki said to Ramírez. “How do you talk about blackness in the D.R. without imposing U.S. or even Haitian categories of blackness onto it?”

Ramírez urged her to feature different narratives of race, especially the ones that are often left in the dark: “The narrative of Dominicans as white nationalists and anti-black is the louder story. So kind of turning down the volume to hear the other stories, which include various forms of black pride,” Ramírez said. 

A student in the audience asked Ramírez a more personal question: how can a person navigate their racial identity, especially for those from a country that experienced colonization. 

“A question that I’ve asked myself my whole life—and also that I know a lot of other people ask—is with this type of history, how can we come to remedy or just find our own narratives and ways of identification?” the student asked. 

Ramírez struggled to address the question. Ultimately, it was the student’s responsibility to find the answer—not another person’s, Ramírez implied. 

“Maybe that’s the answer—that I’m writing against this idea that people with certain backgrounds whose ancestry has been subject to so many layered colonialisms, that … we are given some room to work through those histories without impositions—especially from different spaces of power—in how we define ourselves,” Ramírez said. 

Gilmore, the director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics, and professor of geography at City University of New York’s Graduate Center, honored the 50th anniversary of the Fordham’s Department of African and African American Studies with “Meanwhile: Making Abolition Geography Happen,”

She focused primarily on how the anti-prison movement spans diverse communities, boundaries, and resources, all in the service of shutting down a prison industrial complex that disproportionately affects men of color.

Gilmore recalled the morning of Jan. 17, 1969 at UCLA, when students gathered to discuss what a black studies program should look like. The event was spurred after Chicano and Mexican-American students walked out of classes at UCLA, demanding a curriculum that took their existence into account. After the meeting, two African-American students, Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter and John Huggins, both members of the Black Panther Party, were gunned down in a stairwell outside the meeting room.

“This person was my cousin, my mother is his mother’s sister,” Gilmore said of Huggins. “My life changed the day he died. I was raised in an activist family. He set me on the course that brings me to the front of this room tonight.”

That event stands in stark contrast to the comparatively peaceful takeover of the dean of student affairs’ office at Fordham in 1968 by African-American students and their allies, which The New York Times called “quick and orderly.” Soon after, the administration responded to student demands by creating what would become the African and African American History Department, one of the first in the nation

In contrast, Gilmore described a “slaughter” of students lobbying for black studies at UCLA. While the case has never been definitively resolved and many blame another faction of the Black Panther party, Gilmore said it was “an attack that was set up by the counterintelligence program of the FBI, in association with the Los Angeles Police Department.”

“They were fighting over what the content and the purpose of what was then called a black studies curriculum should be,” she said.

“They brought their collective consciousness of being part of the [Black Panthers] … to what is to be learned, who should teach, who learns what, and to what end.”

She said that two generations later, many of the issues discussed that day, such as the demand for “education not incarceration,” continue to resonate. And even though a place like Fordham never experienced violence on the same level as UCLA, she said students are influenced by the black radical tradition expressed by Carter and Huggins.

In explaining how abolition geography can be used to thwart prison building, Gilmore said that any movement, including education or prison reform, must both continue in that tradition, and also move beyond local coalitions and take a regional approach.

She cited as an example a 1998 proposal for a new prison in Delano, California. The prison, which was proposed by then-Governor Gray Davis, was a none too subtle gift to a local prison guard union that had donated $1 million to Davis’ latest election campaign. In order to defeat the proposal for the “mega prison,” that would house up to 6,000 people, Gilmore said “multigenerational organizers turned their accumulated experience across a wide variety of local, national, and international campaigns to the task getting advice and contacts” to stop the Delano prison.

“They brought strategies and histories from anti-apartheid, black power, agricultural boycotts, university anti-racism, and sexism campaigns, to bear on how they approached people in faith communities, workers’ centers, and hiring halls, social justice, and environmentalist groups, schools and colleges, municipalities, and development agencies, and of course unions,” she said.

Abolitionist geography works, she said, by spanning not only the physical geography and location of a particular cause. It encompasses all the people who inhabit that space, be they black or white, farmers or farm workers, factory owners, and unions.

“For those of you who are wondering when I’m going to get to black history, this is all black history. It is not all black people, but it’s all black history,” she said.

“If many of the people in the story are not black, it doesn’t matter. The principles we are using, and the thinking we are using, and the backbone of strength … this is what black history is.”