Sue Houchins – News

Associate Professor of Africana Sue E. Houchins passes away at age 80

�ֲ��ý News — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 20:00:06 +0000

In an email to the campus community, President Garry W. Jenkins has shared the news of the passing of Associate Professor of Africana Sue E. Houchins, a member of the �ֲ��ý faculty since 2003.

Dear Members of the �ֲ��ý Community,

I write with the sad news that Associate Professor of Africana Sue E. Houchins, a brilliant scholar, champion of critical inquiry and academic freedom, and a gifted teacher praised for a “soaring intellect matched only by her kindness,” died on Aug. 18, 2024, at age 80.

Raised in Washington, D.C., Professor Houchins earned a bachelor’s degree from UCLA and doctoral degree from Union Institute and, for 20 years, was a faculty member with the Intercollegiate Department of Black Studies of the Claremont Colleges before leaving the professoriate to enter a Carmelite monastery in Baltimore.

Upon departing religious life, she was a research associate with the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School, on whose advisory committee she later served. She was a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, before joining the �ֲ��ý faculty in 2003, serving for a time as a special assistant to the president for diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

Professor Houchins was unwavering in both defending and advancing academic freedom and critical inquiry. In 1975, while director of the Black Studies Center at the Claremont Colleges, she was instrumental in the appointment of activist and scholar Angela Davis to her first teaching position after her 1972 acquittal on federal charges, telling reporters that Davis would be a “lecturer with a capital L.” Professor Houchins played a role in protecting Davis from the uninvited media that swarmed the campus on her first day, joining “two burly security guards” in stopping reporters from entering a building. Told that the media was waiting for Davis, she told them to “Enjoy themselves. They’re not going to get Angela.”

Associate Professor of Africana Sue E. Houchins.

Her father, labor economist and attorney Joseph Roosevelt Houchins, was a member of President Franklin Roosevelt’s “Black Cabinet” who led the Division of Negro Affairs at the U.S. Department of Commerce. Professor Houchins had a framed photograph of him with other cabinet members in her office, and in recent years, she and a colleague published two of his papers on Black business development and strategy. Her mother, Frankie V. Lea Houchins, was a physicist and photographer, and at one point a secretary to famous novelist Nella Larsen.

Professor Houchins’ teaching and research proceeded from the intersection formed by the discourses of race, gender, and sexuality. Her courses at �ֲ��ý, which were cross-listed in the Department of Religious Studies and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, included “Black Feminist Activist and Intellectual Traditions,” where she used critical race theory as one mode of intellectual inquiry. Other courses included “Survey of Literature of the Caribbean,” “Literary Representations of the Africana Religions,” and “The Writings of Toni Morrison.”

Her scholarship also concentrated on Black women’s experience of the Divine. With �ֲ��ý faculty colleague and friend Baltasar Fra-Molinero, she published Black Bride of Christ: Chicaba, an African Nun in Eighteenth-Century Spain (2018), a translation of a hagiography of Sor Teresa Chicaba, an African woman who spent her years after enslavement in a Dominican cloistered monastery, including the scholars’ introduction that explores the dynamics of race, gender, and religion in 18th-century Spain. In 1991, she wrote the introduction for Spiritual Narratives of four 19th-century Black women, Maria Stewart, Jarena Lee, Julia Foote, and Virginia Broughton.

Professor Houchins’ impact on �ֲ��ý students was profound, especially for students whose senior theses she advised. This included the honors thesis of Sam Jean-Francois ’23, who praised their mentor for “push[ing] me to think critically since my first day at �ֲ��ý, thereby expanding my mind to horizons I never imagined.” Another honors student said, “Professor Houchins’ soaring intellect is matched only by her kindness.” In 2022, she received the college’s Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching. At a panel discussion to celebrate the award, she said that the vocation of teaching demands that “we instruct students in the practice of pushing back against what is normative, what is safe.”

A certified archivist, Professor Houchins co-directed grants to refurbish, organize, and preserve the Bessie Head–Khama Family Archives in Serowe, Botswana, as well as aided in the organizing and cataloging of the Baltimore Carmelite Monastery archival documents from Vatican II to the present.

She was an evaluator for Ford Foundation Diversity Fellowships for the last decade, and was co-chair of the Program in Africana at �ֲ��ý since 2022. Most recently, she received a �ֲ��ý Phillips Fellowship for 2024–25 to pursue original research in literature, science, and history during her year-long sabbatical. Last year she presented her scholarship at the College Language Association convention. Joining a panel on “Literary Representations of LGBTQ+ Sexualities in the Black Diaspora,” chaired by another �ֲ��ý faculty colleague and friend, Charles Nero, she presented “Representations of Non-Binary Sexualities in the Diaspora.” At the time of her death, she was writing a draft of a scholarly study on the subject, which has been optioned by Edinburgh University Press.

Information about opportunities to honor Sue’s life will be forthcoming.

These two recent �ֲ��ý News stories share elements of Professor Houchins’ life:

I know that the entire community will mourn Sue, and also feel enormous gratitude for her decades of contributions to our intellectual community.

‘She saw herself as the Bride of Christ’: The story of an African nun in 18th-century Spain

Emily McConville — Fri, 07 Dec 2018 17:40:50 +0000

In 1994, just before she entered religious life at a Carmelite monastery in Baltimore, Sue Houchins attended a party at a friend’s house. On the friend’s refrigerator was a postcard depicting a black nun, labeled, “Teresa Chikaba, Salamanca.”

Houchins took the postcard to the monastery with her and began to learn more about the African woman who had joined a convent in 18th-century Spain. Kidnapped from her homeland in West Africa, Chicaba (c. 1676–1748) was enslaved, baptized, renamed Teresa, and raised in a noblewoman’s house in Madrid.

The noblewoman freed Chicaba in her will and provided a dowry for her to join a convent, though most communities rejected her due to her skin color before she found a home among the Dominican nuns in Salamanca.

Though she performed menial tasks in the convent and was unable to take formal vows to become a nun, Chicaba became well-known in Salamanca for her holiness. After her death, a Spanish priest wrote a hagiography, a spiritual biography meant to support the cause of Catholic sainthood.

Sue Houchins later left the religious community she had joined and became an associate professor of African American studies at �ֲ��ý. At her job interview, she met Baltasar Fra-Molinero, a professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies who also knew about Chicaba. The professors collaborated on , a translation of Chicaba’s hagiography along with a scholarly introduction that explores the dynamics of race, gender, and religion in 18th-century Spain.

Here, Houchins and Fra-Molinero talk about why Chicaba’s life resonates today, and how the African nun, despite leaving behind few writings, was able to tell her own story.

Why is it important to know about Chicaba today?

Sue Houchins, Associate Professor of African American Studies

Houchins: You have to understand that convents in the United States did not accept black women until the 1960s. Now there are monasteries all over Europe and the United States that bring women from the Third World and make them nuns to fill out their declining numbers. There are Africans in convents in the First World for whom Chicaba might mean something.

I’ve given papers before black theological societies. I cannot tell you how hungry they are for this book. I go and give a paper, and someone says, “I have to show you something.” They take me to a downtown Catholic church, and there is a side altar with Chicaba’s picture. She already has people devoted to her. There is a sense among black Catholics that the time is ripe for her canonization.

You both teach in interdisciplinary programs at �ֲ��ý, and you argue that it’s important to study Chicaba’s life from the perspective of several intersecting disciplines, such as religious studies, Africana studies, and gender and sexuality studies. Why is that?

Houchins: There is no way, it seems to me, to read this saint’s life and not understand how race plays into it. blackness plays into her notion of herself and the notion that the Catholic Church had of her and how being a woman plays into that too.

Fra-Molinero: Until recently, there hasn’t been a serious theorizing about blackness in the literature and history of the Spanish-speaking world. It’s been more about indigenous people and mixed races. The study of blackness itself, the study of the impact of Atlantic slavery in the Spanish-speaking world — in cultural terms, in the area of religion, it’s lacking.

The story of Chicaba’s life is not enough. The hagiography itself is tremendously rich and tremendously contradictory, and we had to study those contradictions.

Chicaba was born in West Africa, which many European Catholics saw as pagan. You argue that she and Father Paniagua, the author of the hagiography, worked to “Christianize” her background. How did they do so?

Fra-Molinero: The Catholic Church knows how to reinterpret any indigenous form of religiosity: “No, that was not a female deity; that was the Virgin Mary. That was not such-and-such god; that was Saint this or Saint that.” Chicaba participated in that very consciously, because it’s a way of validating the place she came from.

Professor of Spanish Baltasar Fra-Molinero teaches a Spanish course in Roger Williams Hall. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

The hagiography has a poem that is attributed to Chicaba, in which she talks about a polygamous Jesus. That’s not a typical theological position for a nun to write about her Husband, her Spouse. black theologians in the United States immediately accept that. They saw an African diasporic element — it’s clear she never forgot Africa.

Her hagiography says she was kidnapped and taken to Spain at the age of 9, but we suspect it was a bit later because she remembers too many cultural details with the accuracy that only an older person can remember.

As an enslaved woman, Chicaba grew up in Madrid in the house of a Spanish noblewoman, the Marchioness of Mancera. What was her life like there?

Houchins: The book claims that she was privileged. She learned to read and write. But the book also gives you enough of a sense that she was a slave, that she lived in the slave quarters. We think she did a certain amount of labor, but we know that she must have been treated differently enough so that other servants disliked her. I think since she was young, part of her privilege was to have been a companion to the marchioness.

Fra-Molinero: But Professor Houchins and I define the household as a literal madhouse for an enslaved person. It had to be. It was a place rife with violence. The other servants attacked her; they threw her in a pond. They wanted her to drown. A Turkish girl enslaved with her tries to murder her. There is also the danger of sexual assault; there is a priest who tries to seduce the Turkish girl.

She uses the convent as a space where she can practice her mystical union with Christ, because in no other way would she be able to endure her position.

Houchins: The governess who was set to train her either in reading or decorum hits her so hard that Chicaba says she bears the wound and the pain in the old age. This is not a soft life.

So Chicaba entered a convent after she was freed —

Houchins: We don’t know if she was freed with the stipulation that she join the convent, or whether she was freed and the only sensible choice was to join the convent. But she was freed, and she joined the convent.

Fra-Molinero: In a slave society, the freedom of those who have been slaves is always problematic. They still need the documents to prove that they are free because otherwise, by default, they are enslaved. What were the chances or the choices of a free black woman in a city like Madrid in the early 18th century? The choices were few.

How did Chicaba’s race affect her life as a nun?

Fra-Molinero: She’s not a nun.

Stained glass window of Sister Teresa Chicaba by artist Silvia Nicholas, St. Dominic Chapel, Providence College (photo: Patricia Krupinski)

Houchins: Her vows — “I’m chaste, I’m going to be obedient, I’m going to be a member of the family of the Virgin Mary” — those are the prayers and the vows you say at the altar. That’s a document you sign. We don’t have that document. It doesn’t exist, because she never signed it.

Fra-Molinero: There is a moment in the hagiography when, after a church function, she invites two priests to her cell, and Jesus, as a good jealous husband, rebukes her. This anecdote told us two things. One, she considers herself the Bride of Christ, but second, and most important, it tells us her physical position in the convent.

Houchins: To receive these two priests, these two males, we know that she’s not living in the cloister with the other nuns. She never got to live inside.

Fra-Molinero: With her station, the liminal place where she slept, reminded her of where canon law stipulated she had to remain — outside of sacred enclosure. She was reminded of where she had to be. She had not made vows because of her race, because of her blackness, her Africanity.

How did the people around Chicaba notice that she was potentially saintlike?

Fra-Molinero: Chicaba clearly saw herself as a nun. She saw herself as the Bride of Christ, like all nuns. She uses the convent as a space where she can practice her mystical union with Christ, because in no other way would she be able to endure her position.

Houchins: She counseled people. She’s able to affect cures of some sort. In the monastery I entered, those sisters who had been kept out of the choir [the part of the convent that is closed off from the outside world] were the most devout in the performance of religious duties that they technically had been exempt from by virtue of their lower status.

“She succeeds in telling us, ‘My life was hell, and these were the culprits.’”

Chicaba tells you, “I know how to set up a breviary. I know how to say the Divine Office.” I think that she exhibited a kind of piety, besides the gifts she had for curing and for counseling, that made her very, very special. It must have seemed even more special because she was a black woman.

You point out that the hagiography was written to support Father Paniagua’s own agenda. You argue, however, that Chicaba’s voice comes through in the text. How so?

Fra-Molinero: One of the discussions we had was to say, “In what sense is this a typical hagiography, and in what ways does it depart from the typical hagiography, typical story and the life of a nun who’s saintly?”

Professor Houchins came up with the idea to look to the Protestant tradition of black women who tell to other people — particularly men —their spiritual narrative as well as the “as-told to-slave narratives.”

We say this hagiography is an as-told-to slave narrative. There are no other hagiographies like this in the Catholic tradition in which the story of her enslavement is so central — all the way until Chapter 19 of the 40 chapters of the book, she’s enslaved. Paniagua could have put it in just one chapter and then moved on to her life in the convent.

Black Bride of Christ, by Balthasar Fra-Molinero and Sue Houchins, is on display in the Ladd Library along with other publications by �ֲ��ý faculty.

But no. There is all this suffering, all this violence. In other hagiographies, particularly of martyrs, the violence is exerted by enemies of the faith, sometimes they are the Muslims or indigenous people, or Protestants against Catholics, but here the violence is done by fellow Catholics.

These acts are in plain daylight, and [committed by] people from the system. That is where we find her voice. She succeeds in telling us, “My life was hell, and these were the culprits.”

Professor of African-American studies shares spiritual journey

�ֲ��ý News — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 19:05:32 +0000

Sue Houchins, associate professor of African-American, American cultural and women and gender studies at �ֲ��ý College, will speak at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, March 15, at 161 Wood St., as part of “Spiritual Sojourners,” a series sponsored by the Office of the Chaplain at �ֲ��ý College. The public is invited to attend free of charge. For more information, call the chaplain’s office at 207-786-8272.

Since August Houchins has served as a special assistant to President Elaine Tuttle Hansen, taking a leading role in efforts to increase diversity at �ֲ��ý and improve the campus climate.

Before coming to �ֲ��ý in 2003, Houchins held joint appointments in the literature and religion departments at Scripps and Pitzer colleges, and was affiliated with the intercollegiate Department of Black Studies and Women’s Studies of the Claremont Colleges as a faculty associate. She received her undergraduate and her graduate education in medieval English literature at UCLA, where she began a consuming comparative study of women who write of mystical union with a feminine divine.

Houchins continued her graduate work at the Union Institute and Graduate University in Africana, women’s, cultural and queer studies concentrated in literatures and religions. Her publications on this subject include the introduction to the volume of Spiritual Narratives in the Oxford University Press series of 19th-century black women writers.

Her research presentations have included ‘I Found God in Myself/ I Loved Her/I Loved Her Fiercely’: A Study of Suffering in the Archetypal Journey of Alice Walker’s Female Heroes, Sacred Sext: The Incarnational Theology of Bessie Head and Amazonian Dynasties and Spiritual Matriarchs: A Study of the Theology of Affiliation in Toni Morrison and Simone Schwarz-Bart.

Houchins has recently completed a book-length study of Pan African lesbian texts, some of which also explore mystical union. She delivered a portion of this larger work at the English Institute at Harvard.

In 1995, Houchins took time away from academia to enter a Carmelite monastery. In the academic year 2000-01 she was a fellow in the program for women’s studies in religion at the Harvard School of Divinity, where she researched and wrote on the representation of Sapphic women priests in religions of the black Americas.

Recently, Houchins and her �ֲ��ý colleague , associate professor of Spanish, completed an annotated translation with a critical and historical introduction of the 18th-century Spanish hagiography of Sor Teresa Chicaba, an African Dominican nun who spent her years after enslavement in a cloistered monastery.

Each speaker has a story to tell, says “Spiritual Sojourners” organizer and �ֲ��ý College Chaplain Bill Blaine-Wallace. The speaker’s personal journeys serve as “starter dough” for conversation, Blaine-Wallace says.

Houchins’ talk, the sixth in the series, will be followed by two additional 90-minute presentations throughout the balance of the academic year. Each talk begins at 4:30 p.m.