Could you please introduce yourself?
Hi, my name is Dr. Vida Robertson. I am a professor of English and Humanities, and I am blessed to serve as the director of the Center for Social Inquiry and Transformation. My primary fields of research and study are African American and ethnic American literatures. I teach classes in critical race studies, community organizing, identity and community formation. Is that about right?
Comment: Yes, that was great!
Okay, excellent!
So, what are you doing during the summer? Any research or travel plans?
I have several plans for this summer! So, number one, I’m going to be doing a lot of reading and research. I have a couple of research projects that I’m currently working on. The first one is I’ve just finished a compilation of articles for high school and middle school teachers on how exactly we can create more beneficial structures for students of color in our Texas education system — especially for African American students.
My second project has to do with some work that I am currently working on with a group of activists and scholars from around the country. We’re working on a collection of articles about the current attack on Black studies in higher education. It’s called Black Studies Everywhere. The notion is how exactly do we reorganize, reformulate, and actualize Black Studies in a manner that allows us to escape the current attacks on Black Studies and higher education. That means bringing in community partners like Project Row House or the Societies for Africa, the Diaspora or the Gregory School.
How exactly do we do Black Studies even as higher education is dismantling Black Studies? That means black studies needs to go from the classroom back into the very communities that have been undergirding it and feeding it since its inception. So, when we think about the emergence of Black Studies in the 1960s, this work was already being fostered and codified in community libraries, in social organizations like the NAACP, the Urban League, and places like that. But as it grew officially as a discipline from, of course, like San Francisco State University and traveled across the country, then universities became its repositories. So, African American literature, music and culture are some of the mainstays of universities. But under the current administration, those university systems are being dismantled, which means that now Black Studies are under existential threat.
How do we maintain our momentum? How do we continue to empower our communities? Well, we’re going to have to go back into the very communities and make our research more accessible, more focused and more centered on the very people that it was intended for.
So that is some work I’m doing. I’m also going to the Schaumburg Library in Harlem, New York, to do some research. Of course, I’ll be working with my community partners. It’s not only just professors from the University of Wisconsin, of course, several colleagues from here at the University of Houston-Downtown and the University of Chicago.
Lastly, is my research on albinism in African American literature. There’s a scholar out of England, Dr. Baker, and she wrote a book on albinism in West African literature, and another book Charles Martin wrote called The White African American Body. These are two of the only texts in the Library of Congress on the field of albinism. I’ve been interested, for a long time, in tracing the emergence of this figure in American literature, and how it shows up in the writing of African American writers, and others, in the way they use this character to challenge racial norms in white supremacy. This is, I think, one of my most important projects. I have to finish these books before I die because it’s my contribution to, or one of my greatest contributions to academia.
I have a book proposal that I will be sending to Ohio State University Press and others, such as the University of Mississippi. They publish a lot of African American literature studies, so I want to get that accomplished over the summer.
I know it’s probably a lot longer answer than you wanted, but —
Comment: Oh no, it’s great! I want to get very in-depth since it is a professor interview. We want to highlight professors, their projects and ambitions!
So, what classes will you be teaching in the coming semester?
Coming up in the fall, I am slated to teach again a very popular course in ethnic American literature called seminar in Ethnic Literature. We’ll read Toni Morrison as well as Helen Maria Verremontes, some Latinx writers, Native American literature, Asian American literature, and of course, we’ll finish with some Middle Eastern or Muslim American literature. The hope of this course is for us to be able to talk about race and racialization, the way that in a society — a kind of white supremacist society like the United States — how race and racism show up differently in these different communities and as they attempt to be successful in this American society, how their communities and consciousness and ideas are changing.
The overarching goal is to allow students an entry point to see each other. That we are all born at a particular moment in time, in a particular community, in a particular body and so outside of that everyone else is an abstraction. The goal of this course is to invite students to see and appreciate and understand each other’s complex intersectional reality, as well as allow us to see race and racism as a larger kind of structural phenomenon that is governing all our lives.
Another class that I’ll teach in the fall is a new one—I’ll do a new first-year seminar focused on Kendrick Lamar. My hope is to lead students to this kind of organized interrogation and exploration of both hip hop as a genre, as a field, and how it emerges out of this community. Its structural function to address some of the disparities inside of the black community. So, this art form emerges, but it’s also a form of what some scholars would call a kind of protest literature. It’s speaking directly to white supremacy and some of the instruments or tools and institutions that it uses in order to not only reify black humanity, but also to identify the way that racism, white supremacy, sexism and classism show up. Kendrick Lamar is a fantastic, incredibly conscious hip-hop artist. He has done some phenomenal work, and so we get to celebrate his work and see it in a larger context.
Comment: That’s amazing, I know so many students will love this class!
Do you have any exciting summer plans?
I have a son at the California Institute of Technology, and so we’ll go out to California and see him. I’m excited about seeing him and his wife. We get a chance usually to make it back to the Midwest to go see my family in Indiana, and in Michigan and in Tennessee. And so, I spend some time at home and kind of get regrounded.
I’m blessed. This is a fantastic job. I think it’s the best job in the world. It doesn’t mean it’s the easiest job in the world, but it is the best job in the world because I’m around smart people all the time. And that’s fantastic. I get to actively engage the future leaders of not only our communities, but of our state and our country. My hope is to both equip and empower them to make the kind of world that not only serves them as individuals, but makes them critically conscious of the importance of their work in a larger national story. I look forward to engaging with other authors and ideas to broaden my mind so that I am better able to broaden my students’ minds. And so I do, I love this job. I think it is the best in the world, and I’m blessed to be able to do it. I am.
Comment: That was very beautifully put, thank you so much for your time and words!
