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Last year, in the dispatch “There Is No Texting at James Baldwin’s Table,” I began to assess the ways in which audiences were engaging with Baldwin’s writing at several public discussions that I co-facilitated with NYC actor/comedian Grant Cooper. Based on the initial reaction to two five-part Baldwin conversations at a high school and middle school in Manhattan, I posited that a need for meaningful communion is drawing people to discuss the writer. As I wrote that article, I was busy scheduling seven new Baldwin discussions in communities across New Jersey and another five-part series in Manhattan. Having completed those sessions, I am pleased to report that Baldwin’s welcome table is indeed a powerful vehicle for engaging in impactful dialogue. This dispatch will demonstrate that discussing Baldwin not only opened an avenue for productive sharing but went further by inspiring people to ask how they could contribute to hastening positive social and personal transformation. Three questions will frame this analysis of putting the welcome table into practice: How many people want to sit at James Baldwin’s table? Can conversations about James Baldwin sustain more “welcome table moments”? Can these interactions create a sense of kinship that deepens personal interaction in the digital age?
Clearly there is a unique hunger for Baldwin’s wisdom in this historical moment, as illustrated by Raoul Peck’s film, reprints of several Baldwin books, exhibits, and other events. This essay describes the genesis of two five-part public discussions on the works of James Baldwin that were co-facilitated by African-American Studies scholar Dr. Lindsey R. Swindall and actor Grant Cooper at two schools in New York City in the 2016–17 academic year. These discussion series led to numerous Baldwin discussion events being scheduled for the winter and spring of 2018. The surprising popularity of these programs prompted Swindall to wonder: Why do people want to discuss Baldwin now? The first of two parts, this essay speculates that many people in the digital age long for a conversational space like the one Baldwin created at the “welcome table” in his last home in France. The second essay—which is forthcoming—will confirm whether discussion events held in 2018 harmonize with the welcome table thesis.
one way to demonstrate contribution to knowledge. The development of ‘name as currency’ has occurred alongside the individualisation of academia and emphasis on impact as expertise is demonstrated through publications, public scholarship, ResearchGate, and Academia.Edu profiles. Institutions have enabled (and sometimes mandated) this through the creation of online profiles
, had met as a group of academics and activists when Gargi organised a workshop on ‘race critical public scholarship’ at the University of East London (for a sense of the discussions there, see Murji and Bhattacharyya, 2013 ). Drawing on links we had established there and elsewhere, and using a combination of online and offline communications, we came together as a research team in response to developing Home Office initiatives, as
easily polarised. Our research has deliberately been intended as public scholarship, work using rigorous academic methods while engaging with collaborators and audiences beyond the university. In recent years there has been much discussion of public sociology attached to an address by Professor Michael Burawoy ( 2005 ) to the American Sociological Association. We have looked more widely and further back to root our ethos of
calls ‘frames of war’ (Butler 2010), I also believe that focusing our scholarly attentions on images of war alone narrows the horizons of research. Just as embedded positions for journalists in military operations strategically limit or ‘frame’ what might possibly be made visible to the public, scholarship on photography that privileges images of violence risks not seeing the structures that make the production of those images possible in the first place. In what follows I will show how political conflict shapes news images of all sorts of events when the subject
the cult of anniversaries was the antithesis of critical public scholarship. It evolved from the tragic events of the past, the constant fight for survival. It was pious and judgemental, leaving space neither for alternative narratives, nor for doubt and humour. Hanák thus concluded that the historical 175 how to be a historian discipline was badly in the need of realistic and responsible rethinking of national issues. While he was critical of these nationalist tendencies, he also understood their roots. One moment of revelation came when, in the early 1980s, he
Civil War in Greece, which had erupted very soon after the liberation of the country from the Nazis. The Greek Civil War (1945–9) was fought between the Greek Government Army (backed by the United Kingdom and the United States) and the Democratic Army of Greece (backed by the USSR). 11 The MP publicity campaign in Europe was thus addressing a much more divided public. Scholarship on the MP films and the
– tackling issues of aesthetic criticism, literary history and canonicity – gained a central space, along with philosophy, history and music. Despite its growing popularity, in Britain Romantic literary lecturing did not get the same recognition that it had in Germany where ‘state-supported universities fostered lectures as a regular and largely academic form of inquiry and public scholarship’ ( Klancher, 2013 : 5). Particularly debated was