'Articulating Ancestry': Braxton prepares scholars to engage

{{youtube:medium|hVEgG0wzE88, Students are featured in the in-class performance component of Joanne Braxton's "Articulating Ancestry."}}

Joanne Braxton peers into the past and ponders the lessons that
have been buried, swept from the mainstream, delineated as not worthy of
attention. Their bearers, she knows—has witnessed—have been labeled, cast aside,
disenfranchised. Yet, she insists, such stories are in demand. They represent
necessary touchstones as a diverse society seeks examples of how to live, how
to authenticate, how to engage.

Recently Braxton, the Frances L. and Edwin L. Cummings
Professor of the Humanities and English at William & Mary, led students in her
class, "African American Literature and Community Studies: The Art of Engagement,"
on an intensive quest to uncover, dig up, sort out and evaluate such stories.
Much of the excavating occurred in Swem Library, where, assisted by special-collections archivist Susan Riggs, they explored the Ma Raneys, the
Alvin Aileys, the Mildred Lovings and many more less familiar figures from
the local African-American community whose lives seemed to resonate with resolve
against difficult odds.

“In this course,” Braxton said, “students explored thematic
concerns of religion and belief, education for sustainable communities, and
rumor, reputation and asset management through a variety of research tools,
including the study of scholarly literature in the field, in the archives, and
through creativity and performance.”

The class featured a structured syllabus that introduced
students to the foundations of community, the understanding of personal and
community assets, and the preferred methods of engaging communities to help
them pursue effective change.

Among lives examined was that of Henrietta Lacks, whose
cells, harvested from her body, fueled medically significant advances that proved financially lucrative for many—members of her own family, meanwhile, sank
into poverty. Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited—one of the books
Martin Luther King, Jr. often carried in his pocket—spurred discussion as to how people at risk can use internal strengths to overcome external adversities and take control of their futures. Also
addressed was the "prickly"—Braxton's term—topic of restorative justice.

In an exercise of one of Braxton’s unique gifts, the
professor guided the students to internalize the lessons.

“I encourage them to augment the tools of literary and cultural analyses
with the insights achieved through self-reflection, personal assessment and
self-correction,” she explained. Toward that end, an alternative to a traditional class final paper
proved particularly effective. Called “Articulating Ancestry,” the special component had
students go in-character with both historic and contemporary people of their
own choosing, securing those figures as authentic philosophical and cultural
ancestors, according to Braxton.

The imprint on the students was deep.
Assessing the class, Jerome Carter ’12 commented, “Sometimes we can get
discouraged because we do not know what the future holds. We become fearful and
anxious. However, by studying and engaging with the past, we can see that what
we are facing now others have faced before."

Added Margarita Rusolello ’13, “We are given a means for
preserving our self-worth and sanity. Not only can we share in each other’s
pain, we also can find unconventional ways to celebrate our differences, our
strengths and our communities.”

Students, with the help of Riggs, came to understand both
the challenges and the power housed in public archives such as Swem Library. Riggs explained how collections are secured, how access
to papers produced by "non-elites" were
becoming available and how library professionals weigh judgments
concerning the relative merits of source material. Along with Braxton, Riggs led students in conversations
questioning what constitutes a text, what is a viable source, what is worth preserving and
what is not.

Jacklyn Carroll ’13 took note. Later, she wrote, “Scholars
have the power to make a story visible and available, and they have the
responsibility to recognize patterns in scholarship that they study so they
might make those patterns visible not only to the communities they continue to
affect but to the academic world, as well.”

Chantalle Ashford ’14 reiterated the necessity of not only
creating what, in effect, becomes new knowledge but of acting upon it.

“Scholarship has to be an engaged effort and not just the scholar telling
members of the community what they should and should not do to better their
situations, because ultimately they have to deal with the consequences,” Ashford
said. “This is the ultimate challenge to engaged scholarship.”

For Braxton, such insights on the part of her students undoubtedly affirm
her development of the course. In no small way, she has succeeded in, according to the words of her longtime friend and confidant Jayne
Cortez (1934-2012), helping them “find your own voice and use it, use your own
voice and find it” (see related link, top right).