Contact Information
Biography Information
Areas of Specialization
Expressive culture, visual anthropology, education, learning and literacies, African American, Euro-American; United States, West Indies
Background
I want to learn how people keep the world stable and recognizable despite the transitory, contingent, and often dangerous conditions in which so many of us live. I also want to probe the interrelations of possibilities and constraints in these processes -- for example how names, classifications, and representations "make" knowledge but also limit what and how we know. To get at these issues over the years I have studied writing and graphic systems, psychological/cultural classifications such as "intelligence," "creativity," and "literacy;" and arenas of action such as schooling, landscape, artistic and material production, and religious practice. My areal foci are the African Diaspora (especially the U.S., Caribbean, and central Africa) and the contemporary U.S.
Education
PhD Yale 1992
Project Description
This project argues that diversely manifested responsibilities toward land and living space relate integrally to responsibilities toward the ancestors, the living, and the yet-to-be born in the African Atlantic world, past and present. This premise informs two books-in-progress. Wild Flowers investigates ways in which the concept "garden" and "civilization" connect escalating justifications for slavery and assertions of racial inferiority with the history of deisgned-landscape studies in Europe and North America. As a result of these connections, from the early 18th century to the present, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Diaspora remain totally absent from the purview of this field. Forest of Performances enters this space by pulling together information on African and Diasporic designed landscapes from many other disciplines; and by showing through my own field and documentary research how specific landscapes and land-shaping practices are designed to build on the knowledge of past generations, foster right-lving in the present, and lay groundwork for a better future, often against great odds.