It may be cold comfort in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, but within disasters there are ultimately lessons that benefit humanity.

At �ֲ���ý, in fact, the name of an environmental studies course reflects this reality. Taught by Jane Costlow, Clark A. Griffith Professor of Environmental Studies, “Catastrophes and Hope” scrutinizes how disaster narratives can serve us.

Including, in a way, lessons about our expectations from narrative itself. Costlow led the course this winter as the catastrophe of COVID-19 tightened its grip — a catastrophe that, as Costlow and her students discussed one day, is all the more disturbing because we have little idea of how it will ultimately play out.

In other words, unlike hurricanes or earthquakes, COVID-19 thus far is defying our sense that many disasters, like novels or films, have a plot arc.

In that way, the pandemic reminded Costlow of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which was a topic of that class discussion. In the midst of the pandemic, she said, we’re “far away from having a sense of a beginning, a middle, and an end.”

Costlow is not the only member of the �ֲ���ý faculty who is watching COVID-19 and wondering what it has to teach us in terms of what we believe, how we feel and respond, and how we get along. Meet a few more:

Stephanie Kelley-Romano, Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies

For Kelley-Romano, a rhetoric scholar known for her research into conspiracy theories, the noise around COVID-19 may be too much of a professional opportunity.

Conspiracy theorizing is as old as humanity, but “what’s most different about COVID-19 is the audience,” Kelley-Romano says. “We’re all stuck at home, all on lockdown, and that’s around the world. And we have this ‘infodemic,’ this glut of information about the virus.

“Of course, people want to know what causes it, what could potentially prevent or cure it, where did it start, why is it here?” — questions that are like an open cash register to the conspiracy spinners. “And what’s different is that we’re all just available to look on our phones for obscene amounts of time.”

Another difference is the universal reach of the virus. “When we have something that so broadly affects all members of our community in such dramatic ways, it really shakes people up and makes the grasping for information to anchor ourselves more desperate,” Kelley-Romano says.

Which primes people to believe things that, in normal times, they would reject as ridiculous. “And the degree to which people stay engaged on the internet with news seems to me to be inversely proportionate to their actual emotional health,” she adds. In short, she advises, limit your screen time and don’t share conspiracy theories, even just for laughs.

From a Chinese lab being the origin of the virus, to 5G cell phone technology being a vector for it, to cow urine as a cure for it, the pandemic has produced a bumper crop of conspiracy theorizing. Unless she’s working and deliberately thinking about politics and rhetoric, Kelley-Romano finds it helpful to filter her consumption of mainstream news. “I do that only when I cook meals and I’m semi-distracted. I just trust that what I get will be enough.”

Lillian Nayder, Professor of English

“Like so many of the people around us, writers and artists are responding to the pandemic with creativity and with compassion,” Nayder says. “Literary representations will no doubt help us to understand the inequities and injustices underscored by the pandemic, as well as the connections that it has fostered and exposed.”

Looking ahead, she continues, “scholars who study ‘the literature of COVID-19’ will help us grasp the meanings of the disease in cultural, social, and artistic terms — meanings which are already emerging in the medical context of the disease and our efforts to contain it.”

Nayder’s own teaching models that scholarly imperative. Her two courses that examine relationships among literature, empathy, and medicine, she says, are “closely tied to our current crisis and our ways of responding to it — not only in terms of the panic and anxiety generated by the pandemic, but also in terms of the creativity, narrative and otherwise, that it is inspiring.

“In particular, the humanity — and the vulnerability — of medical practitioners who have stories to tell about their patients, themselves, and their families have really come to the forefront.

“These stories of loss, of suffering, of sacrifice, recovery, and love foreground the power and value of what we are calling ‘the medical humanities,’ and our understanding of our own corporeality more generally as well.”

Nayder follows The New York Times’ continuing portraits of people touched by COVID-19, “as well as the political dimensions of the pandemic,” she says.

“And, of course, I’m learning from the stories and experiences that my students are relaying as we’ve been meeting remotely” for her course “The Arctic Sublime,” which looks at 19th-century perceptions of the Arctic — a literature “with its own representations of fear, physical duress, and feelings of awe.”

As events unfold, Nayder continues, “my questions involve the ideas of ‘normalcy’ that the pandemic has raised: What is ‘normal’? When and how — and should — we return to it?”

Cassandra Shepard, Visiting Assistant Professor of Africana

“My research is on disaster,” Shepard says bluntly. Specifically, this New Orleans native examines the impact of settler colonialism — the systematic replacement of an existing population with settlers from away — on the rebuilding of her home town after Hurricane Katrina.

(Long after the 2005 storm and subsequent flooding, many longtime NOLA residents were stranded in cities where they’d taken refuge, clearing the way for a variety of new people — colonizers, really — to take their places.)

“I think about settler colonialism as a disaster,” Shepard explains. “And as a matter of fact, I consider it the disaster that creates more disaster.”

In August 2005, New Orleans residents, hauling what belongings they can, line up to enter the Superdome in advance of Hurricane Katrina. (Marty Bahamonde/FEMA)

In other words, the legacies of racial, economic, and civic injustice left by settler colonialism constitute a slow-motion, mundane kind of misery that gets noticed only when a more-newsy catastrophe comes to call.

Cassandra Shepard, Visiting Assistant Professor of Africana. (Marshanda Smith)

“The things that we think are disastrous are really just an additional cataclysm,” she says. “We’re already existing in a state of disaster — I would consider it perpetual disaster. Then we get a spike, an unusual cataclysm — that could be a hurricane, that could be coronavirus, it could be different things….These spikes really reveal what was already there.”

Shepard sees strong parallels between a phenomenon like COVID-19 and the dominance in recent decades of so-called neoliberalism, the privileging of private-sector over public interests in government activity.

COVID-19, similarly to neoliberalism, “perpetuates inequality,” Shepard says.

“We see how hard it’s hitting communities of color,” as well as unemployed, precariously employed, and undocumented workers — people ineligible for stimulus funds even though they may be doing work that’s now considered essential. “The people who were the most vulnerable are still the most vulnerable.”

In New Orleans’ 9th Ward, houses and automobiles are in piles after Hurricane Katrina. (Photograph by Infrogmation)

A disaster like the coronavirus places a certain obligation on scholars like Shepard. “One of the ways that we can show people that what we’re doing is valuable to their reality today is by engaging with disaster and showing what people don’t know,” she says — “helping people to make sense of what’s happening around them.”

Justine Wiesinger, Assistant Professor of Japanese

Wiesinger has conducted extensive research into the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent nuclear disaster in Japan’s Tōhoku region. Specifically, she studies how that catastrophe and others are represented in film and theater (indirectly inspired by the Tōhoku events, her play Waters Rise premiered in 2019).

Members of a fire and rescue team from the U.S. head into downtown Ofunato, Japan, to search for survivors following the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami. (Photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Matthew Bradley)

She had planned to bring a Short Term class to Japan this year, so Wiesinger has followed the progress of the outbreak there since early February.

Yet, she says, “in some ways, I’ve almost been resisting tying COVID-19 too closely to my research, because I think it’s important to maintain a consciousness that this is an extremely different event” from the 2011 tragedy. “I want to maintain a commitment to keeping the memory of that disaster alive and a consciousness of its specifics.”

Assistant Professor of Japanese Justine Wiesinger. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Still, Wiesinger notes, there are parallels that are hard to miss. “We continue to see, in my opinion, a tendency toward slow and ineffective responses from the central government.” Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe’s “rhetoric has been critiqued as frequently meaningless, impenetrable, and avoidant of responsibility,” she says — a “tone-deafness that’s being widely criticized in social media.”

For instance, “his policy of providing two protective masks per household has been mocked in memes on Twitter using iconic pop-cultural families trying to decide how to divide up two masks among multiple people.”

“In some senses I think people throughout Japan are coming into contact with the absurdities of a leadership that is often more concerned with economics than human life — whereas after 2011 it was mostly just people in the rural Tōhoku region who had to contend directly with similar approaches.”

Wiesinger adds, “Many of us are encountering similar problems in our own countries and these tendencies will have to be confronted worldwide. Sometimes disasters give us the opportunity to clearly see where the cracks in our value systems lie.”

Observed every February, “Black History Month is a time that we get to think about, to celebrate black achievements,” says Charles Nero, Benjamin E. Mays ’20 Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies, and chair of the Program in Africana.

But in addition to that, “it’s a time to continue our discussion of race and white supremacy,” Nero says. “And I’m hoping we also think about and challenge anti-blackness — and by anti-blackness, I mean the ways in which we omit and evade discussions that affirm black people and our right to exist as citizens.”

�ֲ���ý’ Africana program this month holds up such discussions in an especially engaging way: drama.

Using historical events as a basis to explore white oppression and black resistance are five plays: four written by Lecturer in Theater Clifford Odle, each based on actual incidents involving African American slaves in 18th-century New England, and a fifth, Janice Liddell’s Who Will Sing for Lena?, performed by Jes Washington ’13.

Why theater as a vehicle for Black History Month programming? As a performance medium, it gives every audience its own unique experience, Odle says. “It makes things, to me, more immediate, more alive, more visceral.”

“There’s a tradition of the dramatic form and black history that goes all the way back to W.E.B Du Bois’s pageant plays at the beginning of the 20th century,” Nero adds. “There’s a very deep tradition of black theater as a tool to educate about black accomplishment and to challenge anti-blackness.”

The Fireplace Lounge in Commons is the site for readings of plays during Black History Month that draw on historical events to explore white oppression and black resistance. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Washington, who has performed the one-woman Who Will Sing for Lena? since 2016, was a rhetoric major at �ֲ���ý and this year will earn an MFA at the Actors Studio Drama School, in New York City. Liddell’s one-woman show depicts the true story of Lena Mae Baker, a domestic worker in Georgia who killed her white lover/abuser in self-defense in 1944.

Jes Washington ’13 appears in two performances of Who Will Sing for Lena? as part of Black History Month programming at �ֲ���ý.

A jury of white men quickly found Baker guilty of murder, and she was the first woman to be executed by the electric chair in Georgia.

While Liddell’s two-act play grapples with oppression based on skin color and on gender, it’s a broad indictment of the abuse of power — or as Washington puts it, someone exercising “dominion over you just for the sheer hell of it.”

Lena, a dreamer, is “in the position where, no matter what she wants, someone is always dominant over her. She can’t get higher, because the person that is higher than her won’t allow her to do that. It’s her mom, it’s her employer, it’s society.

“She has a childlike quality to her that is beautiful when it’s time to be a child, but not so much when she should be an adult. She never really learned how to be an adult.”

The headstone of Lena Baker in Mt. Vernon Baptist Church cemetery, in Cuthbert, Ga. (Photograph by 86billy86 CC BY-SA https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)

Washington took the role, in part, as a way of coming to grips with trauma she suffered as a child. “Most of the women who were approached to do this role had similar experiences to the character and it was a little too much for them. So they all turned it down,” Washington says.

“It was very close to home for me as well, but I decided that instead of saying ‘No’ and running away from it, I wanted to use it, to heal from it.”

Early on, she says, “I was going through this process of healing, so it was more frightening every time I went up. There was only so much depth I could give it without crying uncontrollably onstage. But as the years have gone on, I’ve allowed myself to think extremely deeply into the character. Lena and I are quite one at this point.”

At �ֲ���ý, Washington belonged to the Modern Dance Company and was one of the students who founded Sankofa, whose Martin Luther King Jr. Day performances examine stories and experiences of the African diaspora.

Advised by Nero, her rhetoric thesis looked at colorism, prejudice based on skin color, within black and Hispanic communities. Her thesis materials comprised a 45-minute video documentary featuring interviews with a host of �ֲ���ý folks — and a 75-page written piece.

“Instead of saying ‘No’ and running away from Lena, I wanted to use it, to heal from it.”

She and her interview subjects, Washington says, talked about the effects of colorism “on minority mindsets — what we think about as far as what is beautiful, what is acceptable, what gets you along in this life. Or some of the things that our mothers would say when we were growing up because they just didn’t know any better.”

The products of assiduous research, including long hours in the Massachusetts Archives, Odle’s Colonial-era plays scrutinize a period in African American history that figures less in today’s consciousness than happenings in the 19th and 20th centuries. Yet there’s an intriguing parallel between the macrocosm of Colonial society and the smaller black world within it.

“Many of the ideas of liberty and independence that the Founding Fathers thought about and eventually fought over,” he explains, “were ideas that African Americans were thinking about and fighting over, even more so because they were dealing with slavery on top of that.

“So while John Adams and other folks can say, ‘Yes, these powers a thousand miles away are going to make slaves of us,’ there are slaves here saying, ‘Well, you’ve already made slaves of us, and we’d like to have a say in this.’”

Sam Alexander ’20, as Phoebe, speaks to Quaco (Dawrin Silfa ’21) near the end of the Feb. 6 reading of According to Mark. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

He says, “Black history in this sense is American history — it’s as much a part of the foundation of this country as Paul Revere’s ride and anything else any of the Founding Fathers did. So I think if you’re a serious about diversity, if you’re also serious about presenting different views of history, then you want to have a venue where these different views can be displayed,” that venue being Black History Month.

Looking at the status of both African Americans and women, Odle’s full-length Deerfield Homecoming combines and fictionalizes two separate historical episodes that took place in Deerfield, Mass.

One main character is Lucy Terry, a slave whose ballad poem “Bars Fight” is considered the oldest known literary work by an African American. The other is Eunice Williams, an English colonist who was kidnapped by the French and the Mohawks as a child and became assimilated into Mohawk society.

J’von Ortiz-Cedeno ’22 of Portland, Texas, asks a question after the Fireplace Lounge reading as Charlotte Lynskey ’21 of Costa Mesa, Calif. listens. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

In real life, Eunice periodically visited her English family. In his play, Odle explains, Eunice’s father kidnaps her on one of those visits. He assigns Lucy Terry, Eunice’s childhood friend, to somehow try to reawaken Eunice’s pre-Mohawk identity.

Each around 10 minutes long, Odle’s other three plays in the Black History Month series are parts of Blood in the Revolution, a work in progress. Performed on Feb. 6, According to Mark is about “a slave who could read and was looking for a way to free himself from an oppressive master. And he felt the Bible provided a path to murdering him as long as he didn’t spill blood.”

The play is set during the planning of the murder, which also involved two other slaves, Mark’s sister Phyllis and a woman called Phoebe. In the actual event, Mark was hanged for the murder and Phyllis was burned at the stake — a punishment that in Colonial America was reserved for female slaves who kill their masters, Odle says.

Quaco (Dawrin Silfa ’21) makes a point to Mark (professor Charles Nero) and Phyllis
(Perla Figuereo ’21). (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Witness to an Execution deals with a literate slave named Andrew who was an important witness to the Boston Massacre, the 1770 killing of several colonists by British troops. As a slave, Odle says, Andrew “does not have the status in society that other witnesses did. So the play explores the kind of pressures that he may have faced in deciding whether or not to actually testify or get involved in white men’s business, as some people would call it.”

Finally, A Suit of Freedom focuses on a woman named Mum Bett, aka Elizabeth Freeman, who successfully won her freedom from slavery in a 1780 court case in Massachusetts. “Her case eventually led to the ending of slavery in Massachusetts,” Odle explains.

“And in that play, she has a discussion with her former mistress, who is trying to lure her back. I thought it’d be interesting to see what that conversation could have been like.”

An image by Renee Cox, as seen in Thomas Allen Harris’ film “Through a Lens Darkly.”

Filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris visits �ֲ���ý College to show his 2014 documentary Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People at 1 p.m. Sunday, March 8, in the Benjamin E. Mays Center, 90 Russell St.

Admission to the event is free. The film’s running time is 90 minutes. For more information, contact 207-786-8204.

Marcus Bruce, Benjamin E. Mays Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Through a Lens Darkly is the first documentary to explore the role of photography in shaping the identity, aspirations and social emergence of African Americans from slavery to the present. Inspired by the work of photo historian Deborah Willis, Harris explores the effects of photography on the lives of black Americans, both in front of and behind the camera.

The film “find[s] the strands of truths revealed, the stories lost, hidden, forgotten, discarded, which will help us to understand the singular traumas that underlie our collective experience,” says Harris, who wrote, produced and directed the film.

For the African American community, photography has been a double-edged sword. It is a medium that has propagated racist imagery, but which has also been used by African Americans themselves, as subjects and photographers, to assert their identity and subvert stereotypes — a tradition stretching back to the Civil War, when Frederick Douglass was photographed in a soldiers uniform.

“Mr. Harris’s film is a family memoir, a tribute to unsung artists and a lyrical, at times heartbroken, meditation on imagery and identity,” writes A.O. Scott of The New York Times.

The winner of Best Documentary in the NAACP Image Awards, the film sparks, as one reviewer phrased it, “a re-evaluation of the visual history of the United States.” Though photographs by such artists as Roy DeCarava, Gordon Parks and Carrie Mae Weems, the documentary paints an intimate portrait of the African American family and tells a story omitted from conventional American history.

Harris will be presented at the screening by Marcus Bruce, Benjamin E. Mays Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at �ֲ���ý, who is interviewed in the film.

Bisola Folarin ’14 of Grand Prairie, Texas, models for the 2013 Inside Africa Fashion Show. (Sarah Crosby/�ֲ���ý College)

Celebrating the cultural wealth and diversity of Africa through performance and apparel, �ֲ���ý College presents its fourth Inside Africa Fashion Show at 6:30 p.m. Saturday, March 7, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

The Africana Club, a student group, sponsors and produces the event. It is free and open to the public but tickets are required, available at . For more information, please contact nkanu@bates.edu or bmabaso@bates.edu.

As in past years, the event showcases contemporary and traditional clothing from around Africa as well as performances of dance, music and spoken-word poetry reflecting African culture.

“This year we expect to have around 30 models,” says event founder Nicole Kanu, a senior rhetoric major from Little Rock, Arkansas. Whether through fashion or performance, the event will represent at least 15 nations, from Senegal in the west to Somalia in the east, and from Morocco on the Mediterranean coast down to South Africa at the tip of the continent.

“These clothes aren’t just coming from thin air.”

“We’ve gotten clothes from faculty, from staff, obviously from students — those who are from the continent and those who have studied abroad,” she says. “And from members of the community.”

At the 2012 Inside Africa Fashion Show, Nerissa Brobbey ’15 models a Togolese boubou dress with matching head scarf. At right, Gulaid Abdullahi ’13 wears a traditional ma’awis and kofia hat. Photograph by Simone Schriger ’14/�ֲ���ý College.

Kanu explains that this year’s show will emphasize the stories behind the outfits. “There will be a lot of personal narrative for the fashion and for the performances,” she says. “The people who own the clothes, you’ll hear what they feel about an outfit or the story of when they bought it. These clothes aren’t just coming from thin air.”

For example, Kanu herself is supplying an ensemble that her aunt, who lives in Nigeria, made for an elderly woman who belonged to Kanu’s church in Little Rock. The woman “was very interested in Nigerian culture, and African culture in general, and so that’s why she wanted it made.

“I think she may have gotten to wear it once, and then she died.”

For this year’s show, Kanu also hopes to include fashions by designers who came to Maine from Somalia and the Congo. This idea speaks to her overriding goal for the show, which has always been to connect people.

“In general, my passion lies in community development,” she says. “I’m very in tune with the fashion, but my point in having this show is really to bring people together, and I think that that’s one thing it has done.

At the 2013 Inside Africa Fashion Show, Jessica Clergeau ’15 of Somerville, Mass., heads the line of models waiting to walk. (Michael Bradley/�ֲ���ý College)

“Initially, I thought this might be a one-time thing. But people would come up to me at the beginning of the school year asking ‘When’s the fashion show?’ or saying ‘I want to model,’ and it’s their chance to be on the red carpet.

“It makes me happy to see them happy, so it has just kind of kept me going.”

Kanu launched Inside Africa in 2012, hoping to raise consciousness about the wealth and breadth of African culture. A rhetoric major, she will graduate from �ֲ���ý in May, making this spring’s show her last, at least as a student.

Taking her place as producer the next time around is Bantu Mabaso, a first-year student from Mpaka, Swaziland. Kanu’s emphasis on community-building, says Mabaso, is what attracted her to Inside Africa.

“That’s what inspires me, and I feel that we can continue with it in so many different and innovative ways,” she says. “Fashion is an up-and-coming industry in Africa. There’s definitely potential for us.”

A scene from Ava DuVernay’s film “Selma.”

Selma, director Ava DuVernay’s acclaimed depiction of Martin Luther King Jr.’s campaign to secure equal voting rights for African Americans, is the subject of five screenings, as well as a panel discussion, at �ֲ���ý from Feb. 27 through March 1.

The film will be shown at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 27; 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 28; and at 2 and 5:30 p.m. on Sunday, March 1, in Room 104 of the Olin Arts Center at �ֲ���ý, 75 Russell St.

Associate Professor of Psychology Michael Sargent. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The panel discussion by �ֲ���ý faculty, staff and students will immediately follow the first March 1 screening, also in Olin 104.

Sponsored by the �ֲ���ý Filmboard and the Office of Intercultural Education, the event is open to the public. Admission is $1. For more information, please contact ckenyon@bates.edu or kpayne@bates.edu.

The �ֲ���ý panelists are:
•    Marcus Bruce, Benjamin E. Mays Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies;
•    Stephen Engel, assistant professor of politics;
•    Hilmar Jensen, associate professor of history;
•    Gwen Lexow, associate athletic director and Title IX officer;
•    Joshua Manson, a �ֲ���ý senior from Hastings-On-Hudson, New York;
•    and moderator Claudia Calhoun, visiting assistant professor of rhetoric.

DuVernay’s Academy Award-nominated film chronicles three tumultuous months in 1965, when King (David Oyelowo) led a dangerous campaign to secure equal voting rights in the face of violent opposition. The epic march from Selma to Montgomery culminated in President Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of the most significant victories for the civil rights movement.

“The film has renewed broader questions about the historical accuracy of films based on true events, and how much freedom a director should take in altering events to tell a compelling story,” says Michael Sargent, associate professor of psychology at �ֲ���ý. Sargent organized the �ֲ���ý event with Charles Kenyon, a senior from East Amherst, New York, and Kai Payne of Jamaica, New York.

“One of us who organized this panel heard a story of �ֲ���ý students going to see the film and at least one wanting an opportunity to discuss it then,” Sargent says. “This is our effort to give �ֲ���ý students, faculty and staff, as well as interested members of the surrounding community, a chance to see Selma and engage in a thoughtful discussion of its content.

“And having a panel that collectively has such broad-ranging expertise means that our discussion will be grounded in historical context.”

Peniel Joseph, Tufts University historian and author, delivers �ֲ���ý’ 2015 MLK Day keynote address. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

What does the Black Lives Matter movement really want?

Yes, it’s one of those questions that can be driven more by hostility than curiosity. Still, in his keynote address during Martin Luther King Jr. Day observances at �ֲ���ý on Jan. 19, historian Peniel Joseph had an answer ready.

“What they want is a new New Deal. They want a greater Great Society,” said Joseph, a professor at Tufts, author and authority on the Black Power movement. “They want an expansive vision of social, economic and political justice that connects democratic ideals to democratic reality.”

From left, �ֲ���ý Dean of the Faculty Matt Auer, President Clayton Spencer and Martin Luther King Jr. Day keynote speaker Peniel Joseph have a word as the event begins. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The divorce of ideals from reality was central to the talk, titled Reimagining Martin Luther King Jr. in the Age of Obama and the Age of Ferguson, that an energetic Joseph offered in the Peter J. Gomes Chapel.

Joseph described a mythologized King, the “prince of peace” that for many has supplanted the reality of King’s last years, when his increasingly radical views made even some fellow black leaders uncomfortable. Joseph also outlined the current resurgence of institutionalized racism in a more insidious form that avoids the language of prejudice while serving its goals.

Against this context, Joseph suggested that the Black Lives Matter movement is a sign of hope — for defenders of both social justice and, in fact, democracy itself — because it supports idealism with effective activism.

In her welcome to a capacity crowd at the Chapel, �ֲ���ý President Clayton Spencer was pleased to point out that the college’s MLK Day committee had picked the day’s theme — From Selma to Ferguson: 50 Years of Nonviolent Dissent — in September, prior to the grand jury decisions about the police shootings in Ferguson and New York City that elevated outrage to a new level.

The Gomes Chapel audience during the 2015 MLK Day keynote address by Tufts University historian and author Peniel Joseph. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Anticipating Joseph, Spencer said that �ֲ���ý’ choice of theme “shows that we on this campus were prepared to challenge ourselves to acknowledge and act on the ongoing stark gap, nearly five decades after the death of Martin Luther King, between the depth of our ideals as a society and our lived reality.”

�ֲ���ý people have been prepared for that challenge for decades, she said, pointing the important legal victories for civil rights won during the mid-20th century by John P. Davis ’25 and James Nabrit ’52.

Son of a union member who first took him out on a picket line when he was 8 years old, Joseph said, “I come to activism from a real-world point of view.” He provided both historical and moral context for the day’s programming at �ֲ���ý.

Joseph devoted much of his talk to a whirlwind review of signal events in the civil rights movement from 1954 to 1965, as King became the leading voice of the movement. These years, which Joseph called the “heroic period” of the movement, began with the U.S. Supreme Court finding that school segregation is unconstitutional in Brown vs. Board of Education; and ended with a year marked with the marches on Selma, the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the Watts riots.

If these events were news to many younger listeners in the Gomes Chapel, what came next may have been ear-opening to some older folks as well. Joseph pointed out that during the last three years of his life, King became increasingly radicalized, coming out in opposition to the war in Vietnam and in favor of a guaranteed income for impoverished Americans.

Marcus Bruce, Benjamin E. Mays Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies, and Associate Dean of Students James Reese listen to the MLK Day keynote address. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“We need to be willing to speak truth to power, no matter the cost,” King said, and the cost to him was losing access to the political establishment. “There [were] no more massive standing ovations by the mainstream for Dr. King in 1966, ’67 and ’68,” Joseph said.

In Chicago, even black leaders — fearing the loss of such patronage as was available to them from Mayor Richard J. Daley’s benighted political machine — told King he had gone too far.

Today, Joseph said, it’s not uncommon to point to Barack Obama’s presidency as a symbol of how far civil rights have advanced in the U.S. And yet, “the reality that we live in is a much, much, much more complex reality,” Joseph said.

If recent events in Ferguson, Staten Island and Cleveland — where a 12-year-old African America boy carrying a toy gun was killed by police — are high-profile examples of institutionalized racism, Joseph pointed out that conditions for African Americans have gone backward in more deep-seated ways as well, from school segregation to incarceration rates to unemployment and poverty.

Many black children, Joseph pointed out, have their first experience with the criminal justice system when they are arrested in school — as young as age 5 or 6.

“We had a better conversation about race and racism in 1965 than we do now,” Joseph said. “At least in 1965, we admitted that there were structures of racism and racial segregation.” Now our society practices a sort of “color-blind racism,” he said, where laws and policies achieve racist ends while never explicitly mentioning race.

John Smedley, Tim Clough and Dale Chapman — aka the Three Point Trio — opened the King Day keynote event with jazz. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“Even as we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.,” Joseph said, “we divorce King the icon from King the political activist who’s willing to speak truth to power and who said that ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’

“We celebrate the dreamer, but we divorce the dreamer from the actual dream.”

The emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, Joseph said, shows that the time may not be past, after all, for realizing the dream.

“The most important, and really hopeful and optimistic, aspect that we’re left with, when you think about ‘from Selma to Ferguson,’ is the fact that so many young people, like in the 1960s, are actually not just demonstrating and protesting — they are organizing.

“They are organizing on behalf of social, political, economic and racial justice. And they are organizing to try to fill that gap between democracy as an ideal in America, and democracy as an actual living, breathing fact.”

Marcus Bruce ’77 marked his appointment as the first Benjamin E. Mays Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at �ֲ���ý with a lecture on Nov. 5 that probed the impact the Paris Exposition of 1900 had on the thinking and work of W.E.B. Du Bois, the historian, author and civil rights leader.

Mays Professor Marcus Bruce ’77 gives his lecture “The Ambassadors: W.E.B. Du Bois, The Paris Exposition of 1900 and African American Culture.” (Sarah Crosby/�ֲ���ý College)

Joined by family, friends, faculty, staff and students, Bruce drew on his years of study into the American Negro Exhibit at the Paris Exposition of 1900 to reveal how Du Bois and his contemporaries wrestled with what it meant to be both American and African American in the early 20th century.

Bruce’s lecture was titled The Ambassadors: W.E.B. Du Bois, The Paris Exposition of 1900 and African American Culture.

This exhibit  — a government-sponsored display of books, photographs, charts and artwork  — was meant to illustrate the progress of African Americans since the Emancipation Proclamation. It was for the Paris exhibit that Du Bois wrote what is considered to be his most famous declaration: “The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color-line.”

In describing Du Bois’ relationship with the exhibit, Bruce noted that “he knew the significance of the moment from a historical perspective. It was his defining moment, and the occasion of his self-fashioning. Whenever Du Bois would discuss the event in the future, he would describe it as his achievement alone, but the exhibit was not his sole creation.”

“[Du Bois] knew the significance of the moment from a historical perspective. It was his defining moment, and the occasion of his self-fashioning.”

The Mays Professorship was established with a $1 million gift from former �ֲ���ý trustee James F. Orr III and his wife, Ann L. Orr, parents of Brooke Orr ’94. Mays, a 1920 �ֲ���ý graduate, was a civil rights leader, mentor of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and former president of Morehouse College.

Bruce was officially appointed to the chair in 2012, along with five colleagues also receiving endowed professorships.

Chair of the religious studies department at �ֲ���ý, Bruce teaches American religious history, religion and literature, African American studies, and American cultural studies.

He appears as a source in the new documentary Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People, in which filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris examines how photography has affected the lives of black Americans.

Bruce said his research into the Paris Exposition has led him into fascinating conversations and exchanges with the descendants of the African Americans who organized and contributed to the Paris Exposition. And, he said, his research continues to unfold more than a decade after it began.

“Every once in a while I stumble upon a great collection of material that can then make the picture fuller,” Bruce said.

Marcus Bruce, Benjamin E. Mays Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

In a lecture celebrating his appointment as the Benjamin E. Mays Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at �ֲ���ý, Marcus Bruce ’77 gives a lecture titled The Ambassadors: W.E.B. Du Bois, The Paris Exposition of 1900 and African American Culture at 4:45 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 5, in Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road (Alumni Walk), Room G52.

The event is open to the public at no cost. A reception follows. For more information, please call 207-786-8371.

The lecture will examine a historic moment for Du Bois, a civil rights activist and author who cofounded the NAACP in 1909, and for African Americans and African American culture.

In a major turning point in his life and career, Du Bois, a 32-year-old sociology professor at Atlanta University in Georgia, traveled to the Paris Exposition of 1900 to witness the unveiling of the American Negro Exhibit.

This government-sponsored display of books, photographs, charts and artwork was created to show the progress of African Americans since the Emancipation Proclamation.

One of three exhibit organizers, Du Bois contributed a sociological study to the exhibit titled the “Georgia Negro” and curated a landmark collection of photographs of African Americans. It was also for this exhibit that Du Bois wrote what is considered to be his most famous declaration: “The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color-line.”

Chair of the religious studies department at �ֲ���ý, Bruce teaches American religious history, religion and literature, African-American studies, and American cultural studies. He appears as a source in the new documentary Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People, in which filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris examines how photography has affected the lives of black Americans.

He is also a featured source in Joanne Burke’s 2012 documentary When African Americans Came to Paris. Bruce received a master’s degree and a doctorate from Yale. He returned to �ֲ���ý to teach in 1987.

Marian McPartland, center, flanked by drummer Joe Morello and bassist Bill Crow. McPartland is portrayed in a �ֲ���ý screening of the documentary “In Good Time.” (Courtesy of Films by Huey)

The Museum of Art exhibition Convergence: Jazz, Films and the Visual Arts expands in autumn 2014 with films, panels and lectures beginning with a talk by the founder of Columbia University’s Center for Jazz Studies at 6 p.m. Friday, Sept. 5, in Room 104 of the Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell St.

The talk by Robert O’Meally, who is also a former director of the Center for Jazz Studies and serves as the Zora Neale Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia, is titled Looking at the Music: Jazz and the Visual Arts. A panel discussion and an additional lecture take place on Oct. 1 and 27 (information below).

Events related to Convergence, as well as admission to the exhibition itself, are open to the public at no cost. An important exhibition of art exploring jazz and African American culture, Convergence is on display at �ֲ���ý through Dec. 13. Learn more at bates.edu/news/2014/06/04/convergence/.

The museum is also presenting Encountering Maine. Drawn from the museum’s collection, this exhibition comprises depictions of the state by such well-known artists as Marsden Hartley, Bernard Langlais, Melonie Bennett, Dahlov Ipcar and Robert Indiana. Encountering Maine shows through Oct. 12. Learn more at bates.edu/news/2014/06/04/encountering/.

The museum is located at 75 Russell St. Hours are 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday (until 7 p.m. on Wednesdays during the academic year). For more information, contact 207-786-6158.

The Convergence film series begins with In Good Time, The Piano Jazz of Marian McPartland at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Sept. 15, in Olin 104. This piece by renowned Maine filmmaker Huey documents the life of the legendary McPartland through interviews and performances. A composer and radio host as well as pianist, McPartland arrived in America in 1948 and established herself as a leading figure in the male-dominated jazz world.

Louis Armstrong figures prominently in “Jazz: A Film by Ken Burns.” (Courtesy of the Frank Driggs Collection)

The film series continues through the fall with the 10 episodes of Jazz: A Film by Ken Burns, the widely acclaimed series premiered on public television in 2001. This musical epic chronicles the history of jazz from its pre-World War I beginnings to the modern day. Showings take place in Olin 104 at 7:30 p.m. on these Mondays: Sept. 22 and 29; Oct. 6, 13 and 20; Nov. 3, 10 and 17; and Dec. 1 and 8.

The Convergence exhibition resulted from a partnership between the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland, and the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City. Three leading authorities on the arts surrounding the jazz movement, all connected with the Driskell Center, discuss the exhibition at 6 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 1, in Olin 104.

The speakers are:

• David Driskell, for whom the center is named. A distinguished artist and collector, this part-time Maine resident is one of the leading authorities on African American art and serves as curator of the Camille O. and William H. Cosby Collection of African American Art;
• Robert Steele, a lifelong collector of African American art who became the founding director of the Driskell Center in 2004 following a career teaching psychology at the University of Maryland.
• Curlee Raven Holton, a painter, printmaker, professor of art at Lafayette College and acting executive director of the Driskell Center.

The speaker series concludes with Jazz Under the Lens, a lecture and screening relating to an important collection of jazz films assembled by the late John Baker, an Ohio lawyer, at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 27, in Olin 104. The speaker is Gregory Carroll, chief executive officer of the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City, Mo., which now holds the John H. Baker Jazz Film Collection.

The screening will include historic Soundies, short musical films from the 1940s that anticipated modern music videos.

Assistant Professor of English Therí Pickens. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Do the people you touch make you the person you are? If you are breathing, can your oppressors claim that you do not exist? Is a seemingly robust Magic Johnson really the best person to promote AIDS and HIV awareness?

Questions like these drive a new book by a �ֲ���ý professor examining the literary uses of bodily awareness in writings by Arab American and African American authors.

The first book-length cross-racial study of narratives reflecting those groups, New Body Politics: Narrating Arab and Black Identity in the Contemporary United States is the creation of Therí Pickens, assistant professor of English. The book was published in February by Routledge.

Putting these two cultural traditions “into conversation with one another,” says Michelle Wright, who teaches African American studies at Northwestern University, “takes the reader through a dazzling array of topics, from the construction of minority subjecthood and family politics to illness and medical practices.”

Pickens’ focus is the narrative use of so-called embodied experience — “what it is to live inside a body,” she explains. “It isn’t just that we see, but that we interpret what we see. It isn’t just that we touch or breathe, but that our touching or breathing has meaning.”

She says, “The book aims to answer the question of how blacks and Arabs in the late 20th and early 21st centuries make meaning out of bodily sense — how they mobilize their embodied experience, with all of its various and itinerant parts, to create social and political critique.”

Pickens argues that African Americans and Arab Americans narratives tend to rely on the body’s fragility, rather than its exceptional strength or emotion, to create critiques.

Authors discussed in New Body Politics include:

• Palestinian American poet Suheir Hammad, who draws on black feminist poetics and hip-hop aesthetics to explore the metaphorical power of breathing and the circumstances surrounding occupied Palestine;
• novelists Alicia Erian (Towelhead) and Danzy Senna (Symptomatic) who, writing from Arab American and African American perspectives, explore the relationship between touch and the sense of self; and
• Lebanese American writer Rabih Alameddine, whose fiction offers a contemporary parallel to a question posed to blacks decades ago by African American scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois: How does it feel to be a problem?

A native of New Jersey, Pickens grew up “in a multiracial, multilingual, multi-ethnic space. And that setting really prompted me to think about what it means to constantly be aware of one’s difference and to engage the difference of others.”

She is acutely cognizant of literature’s power not just to enrich inner life but also to point the way to material change. “I think if we can put literature back into the conversation, then we can truly imagine a better world,” she says.

“The human capacity for storytelling is absolutely amazing and is one of the things that crosses cultures and crosses time.”

Pickens, who came to �ֲ���ý in 2011, bases her research on the study of the nature of awareness itself — a branch of philosophy called phenomenology. In addition to Arab American and African American literatures, her interests include disability studies — a field that bears on “New Body Politics.”

“Disability takes seriously this issue of your body mattering. The field of disability studies asks us to consider disability as a social category” — a category to which, but for the grace of good fortune, “everyone can belong.”

Pickens received an undergraduate degree in comparative literature from Princeton in 2005 and a doctorate in comparative literature from UCLA in 2010. Her poetry has appeared in Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, Save the Date and Disability Studies Quarterly.

Her blog and a schedule of appearances are featured at .