Black & Indigenous Histories
Summer Institute for College and University Teachers
June 12 - July 8, 2024
Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond Virginia
Led by Kate Howell (UMD); Meghan Gough (VCU), Andrea Roberts (UVa); and Thaïsa Way (Harvard U)
Evergreen Cemetery, Old Loop (Started in 1890 by Black leaders in Richmond - designed inspired by the rural cemetery movement. Final resting place of Maggie L Walker and John Mitchell, Jr., as well as important community figures such as A.D. Price, a prominent undertaker)
The Shockoe Bottom Neighborhood of Richmond, Virginia looking west from Church Hill. Shockoe Bottom is the oldest neighborhood in Richmond. Due to the high numbers of tobacco warehouses, which leased enslaved people before 1865 and hired free Black laborers, the neighborhood was also a center of Black life in the 19th century. At the same time, the neighborhood had the second highest volume of enslaved people sold there (behind New Orleans) from 1830-65.
Land as the material world’s ground is “infused with sensations and distinct ways of knowing” (McKittrick, ix). The history of imagining, designing, and making places is equally infused, layered, and messy. This Institute’s participants will interrogate narratives of place histories beginning with the nation’s founding and the cultural landscape of one of its earliest colonies, the Commonwealth of Virginia, and its capital Richmond, as an alternative model for teaching history. Institute participants will explore how we engage the lived experience of Black and Indigenous peoples and communities who imagine, construct, make, use, recall, and memorialize places in our teaching and scholarship.
History as a practice of storytelling reveals how narratives are never simply accumulated marks on a timeline, but rather history is a way of thinking that informs our understanding of the past, present, and the future. Narratives reinforce or elucidate a given belief or truth. Conversely, counternarratives dispute commonly held assumptions about the nature of reality, place, positionality (ethnicity, race, gender, class, sexuality, age, ability) and the political moment. Counternarratives and narratives pervade scientific discovery, finance, education, media, and all areas of our lives because they frame the boundaries and possibilities of debate and gatekeep access. Critical Place Studies (CPS) as a humanist approach to history offers the opportunity to delve rigorously into questions of how place and land inform, infuse, and materialize cultural experience and memory. The CPS approach asks participants to understand history by centering people and communities in place.
This Institute responds to the call for universities to reckon with complicated histories and legacies. As hosts for the Institute, Virginia Commonwealth University, Dumbarton Oaks and the University of Virginia are in the process of wrestling with their heritage. To do so, an exhaustive exploration of its foundational stories, competing narratives about campus climate, and contemplating the problematic nature of some of its traditions and monuments is necessary. A repository of data, syllabi, and multimedia teaching modules will greatly advance difficult dialogues and contemporary efforts to confront the past before transforming public landscapes. The Institute, launched in 2022 in D.C. establishes a resource and community of scholars engaged in examining land, labor, and history across scales.
Learning Objectives:
● Explore transgressive teaching of landscape histories;
● Center Black and Indigenous communities and their narratives;
● Enhance theoretical knowledge of place and landscape in the humanities.
● Explore a Critical Place Studies framework for history narratives;
● Explore place-based learning
Anticipated Outcomes:
● Develop content for a virtual repository of teaching modules
● Steward transgressive learning and reading communities
● Advance approaches to stewarding a landscape scholarship of integration
