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brown/northwestern/nyu: questioning "home"

northwestern university's winter "rock"-- a landmark of undergraduate life

I have to admit, this weekend in Chicago was absolutely amazing. As I mentioned previously, Northwestern University recently offered me a predoctoral fellowship in its brand new Ph.D. program in African American Studies. As many of you know, I'm currently a doctoral candidate in the department of Performance Studies at NYU in the Graduate School of Arts and Science/Tisch School of the Arts. Recently I have been deciding whether or not I would like to move away from my long term home in New York City. Though I do have an offer from Brown University, an east coast, ivy-league institution located in the middle of nowhere, to be honest i'm not seriously considering that department. Thus, this weekend I flew to Chicago to visit Northwestern's faculty and meet the five other admitted doctoral students that would be my colleagues if I were to make this move official. I was kind of blown away by the warm hospitality of the Northwestern faculty, the extraordinary cohort of black queer scholars in the African American Studies department, as well as the exciting projects of the accepted incoming graduate students.

I spent a lot of time in conversation with the chair of African American Studies, Dr. Dwight McBride, who is a major scholar in queer and black cultural studies and author of the books Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism and Slave Testimony, Black Like Us: A Century of African American Gay and Lesbian Fiction, James Baldwin Now , Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality in the U.S. as well as a forthcoming book on the late black gay writer Melvin Dixon. Dwight had students over for dinner at his home in Chicago on Thursday night and delivered a lecture on Friday as a part of the inauguration of his new title, The Leon Forrest Professor of English. His lecture was followed by a talk by African American Studies faculty member Dr. Darlene Clark Hine. Professor Hine gave a truly amazing lecture about the legacy of Maud Cullen, a southern black midwife in South Carolina during the Jim Crow era. At the event I finally got to meet the warm John Keene (a.k.a. J's Theater!), who is a wonderful black experimental writer and literary scholar.

I also met with Dr. E. Patrick Johnson, the chair of the Department of Performance Studies and author of Appropriating Blackness: Performance and Politics of Authenticity as well as editor of Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology. Professor Johnson and I talked about his research on the intersections of performance, race, and sexuality as well as his new project book project that is entitled Sweet Tea: An Oral History of Black Gay Men in the South. Patrick also announced that D. Soyini Madison , an important black feminist performance studies scholar, will be a visiting scholar at Northwestern next year.

After a wonderful and exciting conversation with Dr. Jennifer Brody, a feminist literary critic and black british cultural studies scholar (as well as the author of Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity and Victorian Culture) I was thrilled to learn that Dr. Sharon Holland, will also be joining the department's faculty beginning this fall. Professor Holland is the author of one of my favorite recent scholarly texts, Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and Black Subjectivity.

To top off the weekend, on Saturday morning I had breakfast with Dr. Sandra Richards in Evanston, where we discussed her current graduate course on black feminism and black queer studies (co-taught with E. Patrick Johnson) as well as her recent research on African American tourist productions to former slave sites in the Black Atlantic (such as the "Gate of No Return" on the West Coast of Africa).

Over the course of the weekend it was also great to get to know the other five admitted students in the program, including fellow black queer blogger Blackademic. She would be coming to the department to work on black lesbian cultural productions (film, literature, performance art) in the U.S. The other four admitted students were from Stanford, Cornell, Columbia and UC-Berkeley.

I still have made absolutley no decisions regarding whether or not I will be leaving New York University, however I can say that Chicago definitely left a great impression on me. There is something very special going on right now in this region of the country in terms of scholarly work on race and sexuality. At this point it's either stay at "home" with my dear advisors Jose Esteban Munoz and Tavia Nyongo here in New York, or begin a new life in Chicago. We'll see what happens.

Can you imagine me living in Chicago or Rhode Island?

Posted by the young people's professor on 3/04/2006 at 12:17:00 PM |

It all sounds so exciting and I'm extremely happy for you. Obviously both programs are strong with strong faculty members/mentors. I'll be praying that you get word on what is the best decision. Either way you have to be pleased to know that students after you will have more and more great choices for studying in your field.

Posted by Blogger MatisseNdegeocello | 3/05/2006  

GLAD YOU HAD A GREAT TIME...

WOW, UR MOVING? INTERESTING PLACE UR GOING TO. JUST WEIGH UR OPTIONS, LISTEN TO UR HEART, AND FOLLOW YOUR CAREER!

Posted by Blogger ShawnQt | 3/06/2006  

Northwestern will be your best bet!

Posted by Anonymous Anonymous | 3/06/2006  

Just wanted to congratulate you on your many opportunites and also let you know that you inspire people everyday...Keep up the good work!

Next in Line,

JeyJey

Posted by Anonymous Anonymous | 3/06/2006  

jealous that you got to meet john keene.
mad that niggas act like dey fingers broke. (call me, fool!)
scooping up that "Impossible Purities" ASAP for my critique of the theory of subversive victorianism that Higginbotham sets forth in "righteous discontent". thanks for the heads up!

PS- you know if i didn't come to princeton, i'd be at the university of chicago. of course, i'd miss you somethin' terrible, but it WOULD give me an excuse to fly out there as frequently as i'd like. keep me posted

Posted by Blogger Larry D. Lyons II | 3/07/2006  

thanks to air travel, chicago ain't but two hours away from the apple whenever you get homesick. amazing, the doors opened to some of us. isn't it?

Posted by Blogger Karamale | 3/07/2006  

frank--
it was wonderful meeting you this weekend. i hope you come to northwestern, i think it will be an amazing place to study. and i hear chicago is a great city, so it works :-)

anyways, good luck with any choice that you make. your work sounds so interesting.

Posted by Blogger nubian | 3/07/2006  

Son, yo. Fuck that shit son. You need to start selling rock with me on the corner son. Fuck a PhD. Answer me this! Answer me this! Can you kick my ass?!

Posted by Blogger Gizmo | 3/07/2006  

This is a re-post at the request of the blog author (who actually saved it for me...)

Hello! Congratulations on your publication. I wanted to touch upon some of the politics of identity/identification. Obviously there is work that we straight people ought to be doing amongst other straight people, instead of leaving our muddy footprints all over your floors and your plans. On the other hand, there must be some point of intersection where we know that we haven't become ventriloquists, haven't stolen important voices or even worse, imagined that we were those voices, and that, I'm afraid, can only come from the owners--or those who wish to claim--these voices. It is a question born of some activisism, some scholarship, but mostly just a lot of listening and listening and listening. The trick is to make well-wishers into well-doers, and that's certainly not something they/we can handle on their own. On the other hand, knowing very well that for you, "it isn't my job to educate you etc."....well, then what?
I am invested in this, clueless though I might seem.
One another thing: (not included in the re-posting)
Since I am in the biz, one thing I DO know about is grad school. PhDs are extremely useful things, if only as platforms--you can still hang out on street corners after, yo!--I shall join the chorus for Northwestern, as Brown may slightly justify itself for its undergraduate programme, but has yet to find a raison d'etre for its graduate programme. However, you know by now that I am one OPINIONATED woman, so take that into consideration.
I'll be dropping in now and again! Thank you for all.

Posted by Anonymous Anonymous | 3/16/2006  

Hey - interesting blog. I live in CHI, and went to Northwestern University. Should you go? It depends. First and foremost, many people compare cities, and even tho CHI and NYC are similar, you can't compare them - the vibe in each is very unique, and in turn, matters of race and gender (and the willingness to talk about these things) are very different. Northwestern as a whole is also much more conservative than NYU (I'm speaking of the student body more or less), and in terms of academia, perhaps a bit more. . . apathetic. Of course, I'm speaking of my experience as an undergrad there.
Racial tension is high in CHI, given its history, and Northwestern reflects that as well. At Northwestern, the tensions are usually held under the lid until something explodes it. Students are also a bit neurotic, but hey that just comes with academia.. . .
Whatever your decision, best of luck!

Posted by Anonymous Anonymous | 3/21/2006  

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