Ardra Whitney: Week 32 @ Avery Research Center

Monday, April 8^th - Tuesday, April 9^th:

I sent Mr. Thomas McTeer a thank you note for my visit to his home in Beaufort, SC. In the note I expressed my enjoyment in having the opportunity to learn about his father, Sherriff J.E. McTeer’s experiences with the practice of Voodoo and Hoodoo in South Carolina’s Lowcountry, as well as my appreciation for the free copy of his father’s memoir he gave me. I also e-mailed librarians, Grace Cordial and Charmaine Seabrook, at the Beaufort County Library to request a follow-up visit to complete my research on the library’s collection of materials pertaining to Hoodoo.

Wednesday, April 10^th:

In the morning I posted an announcement to both Avery’s Twitter page and Not Just in February Blog, calling for papers and panels for the Fall 2013 Conference and Symposium, “Unleashing the Black Erotic: Gender and Sexuality—Passion, Power, and Praxis”. This year’s conference and symposium seeks to provide a forum where participants can articulate the wide, varied, and expansive nature of gender and sexuality, and the performance of both. It also aims to teach African Americans how to understand, embrace, and harness the power, beauty, and essence of the erotic as a key to their positive evolution as people. The conference and symposium is inviting proposals from across disciplines, but is most interested in proposals that address aspects of: black bodies in popular culture; black sexuality in television, film, and literature; queering the black body in art and performance studies and iconic black queer motifs; sexuality and black faith; black women and the politics of respectability; black erotica, romance novels and comic books; the black body and public health; hip hop and the hypersexuality of black women; alternative modes of black love and family; and the politics and economics of porn.

In the afternoon I created a favicon, using PowerPoint, for Black in the Lowcountry (BIL): Digital Photo Archive’s Tumblr page and also posted a second round of photos to the page. According to Wikipedia, a favicon— also known as a shortcut icon, Web site icon, URL icon, or bookmark icon— is a file containing one or more small icons that is associated with a particular Web site or Web page. “Browsers that support a tabbed document interface typically show a page's favicon next to the page's title on the tab.” For BIL’s favicon I decided to go with a digital artwork titled, Uncle Remus Triptych (2011). The work features images of three characters from African-American folklore: Uncle Remus, Brer Rabbit (Brother Rabbit) and Tar Baby. I chose this work because while processing the Virginia Geraty Papers, I came across manuscripts and printed drafts for children’s books by Geraty featuring the animal trickster, Brer Rabbit. Geraty’s translated versions of popular African American folktales reflect the rich storytelling tradition of the Gullah people; that too were influenced by African and Native American oral traditions and include stories about the antics of animal tricksters such as Brer Fox, Brer Bear, Brer Wolf— in addition to Brer Rabbit. And in the same way that these folktales impart meaningful lessons to their listeners, I want BIL to teach viewers to see the value and historical significance of the African-American experience in the South Carolina Lowcountry.

Thursday, April 11^th - Friday, April 12^th

A little after 9AM, Graduate Assistant, Daron Calhoun II and I entered into a wonderful conversation about the books: Janie Mitchell, Reliable Cook: An Ex-slave’s Recipes for Living by Lisa Foster and Mary Lou Coombs and The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 by James D. Anderson. We also spoke about the history of African American Higher Education in the South, the founding history of Morehouse and Spelman College, the Hampton Model of Normal School Industrial Education, and the fundraising efforts of Marcus Garvey and Booker T. Washington— specifically Garvey’s appeal to the Klu Klux Klan to fund his UNIA-sponsored movement for repatriation to Africa and Washington with his U.S. fundraising tours, which allowed him to finance court cases that challenged the disenfranchisement of blacks in America.

During the latter part of Thursday, I had a chance to complete and return my poster presenter agreement form for the 2013 SAA Conference via e-mail. Throughout the week I continued processing series from the Virginia Geraty Papers and by Friday I had completed work on approximately fourteen of the collection’s eighteen proposed series and sub-series. These series included: educational and instructional material, ephemera, literary productions and manuscripts, lists, maps, oral history materials, and documents pertaining to the production of Geraty’s Porgy: A Gullah Version, which was performed at Charleston’s Garden Theater in 1995.