 I'm Steve Goddard, Interim Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development. It's my pleasure to welcome you today, and thank you for joining us to the Fall in Nebraska lecture. This is the second in the 2016 Chancellor's Distinguished Lecture Series. Today's lecture is being web streamed live, so I want to thank and welcome everyone who's joining us via the web. For those of you that use social media, you can see here, hashtag NEB lecture, NEB lecture is the hashtag to use if you're going to communicate via social media about today's lecture. And I hope you do that and create some activity out there and reach out to more people. So the Nebraska Lectures is an interdisciplinary lecture series designed to bring together the university community with the greater community in Lincoln and beyond to celebrate the intellectual life of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln by showcasing our faculty's excellence in research and creative activity. The lecture series is sponsored by the UNL Research Council in collaboration with the Chancellor of the Office of the Chancellor, the Office of Research and Economic Development, and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, known as OLI. And I'd like to help you give a warm welcome to the OLI members joining us here today. Thank you. Holding the mic, it's hard for me to actually clap, so I don't mean anything disrespectful by doing this way. Today's lecture is also sponsored by Humanities Nebraska, and I'd like to extend a special welcome to Erika Hamilton. Erika, good to see you, Director of Literary Programs and Heather Thomas, Director of Development. We greatly appreciate the support of Humanities Nebraska. Please help me in welcoming them as well. Finally, I'd like to recognize and thank the University Research Council, which has composed a faculty across the university in many different disciplines at the University of Nebraska. The council solicits nominations from the faculty for the Nebraska Lectures based on the basis of their recent accomplishments and their ability to communicate that to a general audience. The selection as the Nebraska Lecture is really one of the highest recognitions the council can bestow on an individual faculty member. So it's a tremendous honor when we recognize someone, and we are always very appreciative when that faculty member then agrees to serve and present the lecture for us. These are fascinating to listen to the variety of lectures over the years. We get quite across all the disciplines, and it's really an opportunity to learn and participate in the intellectual life that we get to enjoy every day at the university. So we're well glad that you're here. I'd like to talk to you just a moment about the format today so you know what to expect. Following the lecture, Muhammad Daab, the Vice Chair of the Research Council, Muhammad, and Professor of Civil Engineering will moderate a question and answer session. So when we do that, there's a microphone there. We'd like you to ask your question in the microphone so we can capture the question for the audience. It's watching the web stream, and then that frees up our speaker from having to repeat the question and remember to do that. We can have a nice dialogue that way. Feel free to introduce yourself before you ask your question. Following the question and answer session, please join us for a reception in the Ubuntu room in the Jackie Gahn Multicultural Center. Just down the hall that way, right? I get turned around. I always want to point that way, but it's that way over there. And we're also glad to have partners from the... Sorry, I started to go down the wrong page here. Glad to have our partners from the University Bookstore at the reception. They'll have copies of the books published by the African Poetry Book Fund that are available to purchase. And many of these books were published in collaboration with the University of Nebraska Press, which is proud to publish Kwame's work from the American Poetry Book Fund as a partner in the publication of the Prairie Schooner books. So thank you very much to the Nebraska Press. Okay, now it's my pleasure to introduce our speaker. Dr. Kwame Dawes. Dr. Dawes is the Chancellor's Professor of English and the Glenna Lucia editor of Prairie Schooner, the University's premier literary journal. He is known as a prolific writer, scholar, editor, and poet. So it should come as no surprise that Dr. Dawes was able to transform the American Poetry Fund from a small literary project based in Lincoln, Nebraska, into an internationally known organization in just four short years. That's really a remarkable transformation in that timeframe. This project is a success story because Dr. Dawes recognized a major gap in the publishing world. Until the American Poetry Book Fund was born, not a single publisher focused exclusively on publishing African poetry. Thanks to his group's hard work and vision, emerging poets now have a much needed network of mentors and colleagues. The book fund made it possible for 40 poets to get published and for five poetry libraries to be established in Africa. That's just the beginning of the project's impact. Dr. Dawes joined the UNL faculty in 2011. He has a bachelor's degree in English from the University of West Indies, Mona, and a doctorate in English from the University of New Brunswick. Previously, he was director of the South Carolina Poetry Initiative and the associate poetry editor at People Tree Press. He is acclaimed for his work in Caribbean, African, and African-American literature. Dr. Dawes received a prestigious 2012 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship and a 2009 Emmy Award for Multimedia Project on HIV, AIDS, and Jamaica. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Kwame Dawes who will present When They Become Me, Responsibility and Action in Literary Activism, the case of the African Poetry Book Fund. Ah, yes. Good afternoon. You can hear me fine, can't you? Good, good. I don't know what happened, but somebody should have thought carefully about putting a mic on me a couple of days after the election, but I guess they had a different outcome in mind. But I'm going to stick to my lecture. That's what I will do. I also think it's kind of funny because when I was asked to do this, it was very generous, and I felt very honored, but I was in the middle of a poem, which means that when you talk to me when I'm in the middle of a poem, I'm grumpy. And so I think I was grumpy because then I said, so what am I supposed to do? And then I was told I'm supposed to give a lecture. And then the good news was that some of your friends recommended you or nominated you, and I thought those are not my friends. I thought it. I thought it, and then I said it. This is a problem when I'm working on a poem. So I actually said those words, and it became a little awkward because I don't know. I mean, I should have been doing somersaults, but I just thought I'll write something. And I'm wearing a jacket and things like that, which is stuff that I try not to do. But very quickly, I became appreciative of the honor of doing this. And so I wanted to thank the University Research Council, Humanities Nebraska. Steve got out for that wonderful introduction. The Chancellor, everybody, and all of you who are here to be part of this. So hopefully it'll be interesting, and if not that, at least slightly entertaining. I'm going to do a lot of reading, and just to show you that I'm very hip to the technology I'm using an iPad to give my lecture. And I know you're really impressed by that. Yeah, so that's what I'll do. Now, there are many ways, I want to dedicate this talk to my grandfather, who I never met. My grandfather, a man called Levi Augustus Dawes, moved to Nigeria from Jamaica in 1904, 1905, to work as a teacher in Nigeria, funded, of course, by missionary societies and so on. And he taught there, my father was born there, and his siblings were born there, and they returned to Jamaica in 1926. Well, 1924, 1924. And he died long before I was born, but there is sort of rehearsing his life and rehearsing the life of my grandmother. It's very clear to me that the relationship between Africa and its diaspora and the connections that have been existing for several centuries, some not as fun as others, have shaped me and given me a sense of who I am and what I do. And so I dedicate this to him for complicating that part of my life, and then later on my father made the same move, so I was born in Ghana, grew up in Jamaica, and complicating that. And then, of course, I came to America and further complicated my children's life. So now there are many ways in which one can envision a university and its role in the world. The University of Nebraska has made a concerted effort to start associating the word global with so much of what we do and what we want to do. My sense is that we have as a university recognized that despite the apparent rhetoric towards a certain kind of cultural insularity and political disengagement with the world that is abroad today, the very core of intellectual endeavor has to be global. It has to engage all the possibilities of intellectual growth and impact that may exist in the world. A global vision does not preclude an understanding of the local, but it also recognizes that the university is a tiny cosmos in which we can access the wider world of thought and in the process expand our human understanding. If this does not happen at a university, where else can it happen? My hope is that this talk will achieve a number of things. The first will be a brief meditation on the action and scholarship and the ways in which we can consider responsibility and passion as necessary elements to the work we can do as human beings in the world. The second will focus on the beginning and the achievements of the African Poetry Book Fund. Perhaps we can call this a case study on the thoughts about activism, literary activism in this sense, and the third will take us into the future and in it I hope to talk briefly about a larger vision for African poetry and politics and the extent to which I hope it becomes a part of what we are and what we do here in Nebraska. I choose to speak about this project because I think that this subject, because I think it offers us a model for values of inclusion, cultural openness, diversity and intellectual integrity, and venturesomeness that I believe we hold dear here in Nebraska and that I dare say we should hold to in America. So I'm asking you to do something that may seem obvious to some of you, but that may prove challenging to others if you are honest with yourself. I'm asking you to think of Africa in ways that extend far beyond the notions of a place that needs help. Instead I ask you to think of Africa as a place rich in intellectual and artistic resources, a place with a longer dynamic history of cultural complexity that has long helped to shape our understanding of the world and a place from which we can greatly benefit if we regard the people of the countries in that vast continent as genuine intellectual and cultural partners. So when they become us. In 2000 I was first, I was just shy of turning 40. A friend of mine, Colin Chana, a novelist, was traveling with me throughout the UK and we found ourselves complaining about the readings, festivals and cultural events we were attending on this literary tour. So as we complained we began to talk about what the ideal event would be. We inevitably found ourselves engaged in the kind of locution that sounded something like this. You know what they should do, right? They should, etc., etc. And then we would list the brilliant things that they should do and until that time we had never stopped to wonder who they might be. We just imagined that there existed out there people who got things done and when they were not done we could blame them for their failures. Yet on that trip we suddenly recognized something important in ourselves. We had always imagined they to be people older than us and with the resources to do things. But we were now circling 40. We were they. This was a revelation. It changed everything. Our complaints became plans. Our wishlist became plans. Our questions became the substance for plans. We were they. And this changed the game entirely. To be clear, I've been since my late teens actively creating entities and organizations and projects of all kinds as a response to absence. I started a theater company when I was in my early 20s. I started a theater workshop for aspiring playwrights around that time as well. And I've continued to do this sort of work over the years. But in 2000 the ambition shifted. I did not feel as if I was doing some things that others were doing but I felt that if we did not do these things they would not be done. They then become we. And many things have happened since then. Initiatives, institutes, book series, festivals, conferences, and on and on and on. Which brings us to the African Poetry Book Fund and its genesis. So about five years ago, maybe four and a half years ago, a conversation with Christopher Abani, another wonderful writer, while on tour in Southern Africa apparently all these things happen while we don't have anything to do on the road. We were in Southern Africa I think at that time we were in Zimbabwe I think. It led to another of those they scenarios which abounded around African poetry. The we rejoinder would lead to the establishment of the African Poetry Book Fund. The African Poetry Book Fund was established then in response to an absence, a gap. There was no publisher who was exclusively devoted to publishing African poets. This seemed ridiculous to me. Even as it explained why so often people complained to me that they did not know where to find the work of African poets in print. A few of us felt that something needed to be done and so we formed this entity and brought together a group of gifted and successful writers who have all had a remarkable track record of supporting the work of other writers. These included Chris Abani, as I mentioned, Bernadine Everisto, based in the UK, John Keane, a wonderful African-American scholar here in the US, Matthew Shinoda, an Egyptian-American poet, and Habiba Baderoun, a South African poet who teaches in Pennsylvania. And they constitute the remarkable editorial team for the fund and we've added two more people, Aracela's Gourmet, a fantastic poet here in the US and Philippa de Villiers, who is based in South Africa and also a wonderful poet, so that's the crew. They just joined this year. Now we were able to attract a generous benefactor in Laura and Frank Silliman, who have helped us get this project started and have committed to support us over the years. And it's largely been Laura Silliman. Now I speak of the support of Laura Silliman as a passing incident, but that would be a mistake. The fact is that how we met and how she came to be the main financial supporter of the work we've done is both amusing and instructive. I've been awarded the prestigious Poets and Writers, Barnes and Nobles Writers for Writers Award that is given every year to individuals and organizations that have worked hard in the support of work of other writers. The award ceremony was a Gala fundraising event in New York City. On the morning of the event, I sat with Glenna Lucia, who is the benefactor of Perry Schooner, and had breakfast with her. I told her about this vision for African poetry and she said, pitch it at the Gala, meaning pitch it for money at the Gala. I was obviously reluctant. I said that the award was not about that and these people were not expecting me to do that. At that time it could be really embarrassing and it shows a sign of ingratitude. Her response was, I know these people, they are my people, they have money, pitch it. So I pitched it. Now needless to say, while people applauded me afterwards, most of them avoided my eyes. I guess they feared I would pounce on them and say, well, well, so they just, people just looked away. Anyway, at some point I was talking to somebody and then a woman walked up to me and asked me a few quick questions. She asked how much money it would cost to get the first year of publishing done. She asked when I would need the money and then I sort of stumbled around making up some answers because I really wasn't expecting that specific question. But I'm good at making up answers, like especially when money is involved. Then, and I didn't know who she was. Then she handed me her card and said, okay, you've got it, and then she walked off. But before she disappeared into the crowd, she threw back, read the back of the card, and then she was gone. So I did, and she had written on the back of the card, don't worry, I'm not drunk. So this was my first meeting with Laura Silamon and we've become good friends since then and she has been the chief and singular benefactor of the African Virtue Book Fund. We've also been able to get support from other benefactors like Glena Loucher, without the staff of Prairie Schooner, Ashley is here as the managing editor. It's a journal that I work for and the support of the English department at the University of Nebraska, Marco Abel, is here who has been incredibly supportive. Much of the work that undergirds the various efforts of the African Poetry Book Fund would just not happen. We've created a wonderful network of people who help us to identify and publish some of the best work being written by African poets. We've also been able to form partnerships with publishers like Slapper and Hogg Press, who we did the first box set with, Akashic Books, who we currently work with, the University of Nebraska Press, which you've heard of, heard earlier, have been very involved in the publishing of the list. They have our African Poetry List and the Amalian Press in Senegal, who are our African based publishing partners. We are currently in partnership with another press out of South Africa to do a special issue of the port of one of the great South African ports, the poetry of one of the great South African ports. We've also had support from outfits like the Poetry Foundation, numerous institutions, including the Ford Foundation. Remarkably, when we started the African Poetry Book Fund, at the same time in the UK, Bernadine Everisto was putting in motion what has become the Brunel Prize in African Poetry. And this year, and over the years, we've had multiple entries and we've been exchanging lists and so on and created this fantastic network of people interested in African poetry. It is fair to say that in the last year, over 70% of the poetry published by Africans in the US was published by the African Poetry Book Fund, which sounds very exciting and impressive, but it's actually slightly pathetic, really. It should be more. Our number should be far less. That's just the truth of it. But we're filling a gap and that's important. So while we are publishing work by first-time writers, we are also publishing the work of Established Poets. By folks, we regard as senior poets from Africa. These include people like Kofi Awunna, the late Kofi Awunna, Amma Attaedu, Gabriela Okara, who we've published. And eventually, we believe other publishers will start to pay attention and acquire the work of African poets. This has already started to happen and we expect this to get better as time goes on. In other words, those ports that we've published in these beautiful chapbooks, box sets that you see here and some of them are out there, these are quite stunning. We put maybe 8 to 10 chapbooks of ports in each of the box sets. For the first two box sets, virtually all the ports who are in there have had a full-length book published already. And these were their first publications. We broker, we talk, we bully people, we call publishers, we tell them you should publish this person. That's what we do. All of us do it voluntarily, nobody gets paid and that's the work that we're doing. So why poetry? You will ask. Clearly you all came because you love poetry. Now poetry, as with much of art, can allow us to practice the art of empathy. Empathy is fundamentally an act of the imagination. The capacity to imagine how someone else is feeling or seeing. Poetry demands that we engage this capacity to imagine in empathetic ways. Not all poetry does this, but most of poetry does. Empathy is not merely a gesture or feeling, but a gesture of intellect, an act of willfully transporting oneself into someone else's space, someone else's body, mind, and if we believe that in their soul. I believe that this gift is one that has to be practiced. I believe the capacity to empathize can atrophy. I believe the capacity to empathize can be destroyed. We know this by the ways in which we train assassins and soldiers to somehow suspend empathy in order to be effective on the battlefield. Some of the greatest politicians have a striking deficit of empathy. It makes them better politicians, but it diminishes the capacity to be functioning human beings. I'm not going to begin a campaign against the psychic wounds we inflict on our people in an effort to survive in a dangerous world, but I'm suggesting that art, especially poetry, can introduce this impulse towards empathy in ways that can affect change. So yes, poetry does change things as long as we give people the capacity to empathize and feel with. Racism, after all, is predicated on a failure, willful or otherwise, to empathize with those who seem different from us. I believe that while the precepts of my faith, the healing of the wash of love that comes through community in this faith played a major and miraculous role in making me a better human being, my immersion into the world of art, into the rich and beautiful imaginations of artists over millennium has played a significant role in shaping me, granting me a capacity to feel with and a desire to try to understand people who are quite different from me. So that said, poetry should not be mistaken as a substitute for action, for protest, for voting, for resistance, for teaching, for feeding those who must be fed, for an embrace, for solidarity, and where necessary for sacrifice. When Bob Marley invokes the idiom talk is cheap in his song Heathen, he's not suggesting that we should not talk. He's rather saying that while it is easy to say what a man so shall he reap, it does not make it any less true. Poetry is in that sense cheap, but the hotter the battle, the sweeter the victory, he says. So poetry may be cheap, but sometimes poetry is necessary. And yet Marley wrote the songs that allowed me to say this to you, to observe this and understand this. He wrote poetry. Much of what we rest our sense of national authority and achievement on is on our arts and on the work of our artists and thinkers. We continue to teach the work of great artists because we believe that those works speak to something distinctive in our humanity. We know this is true. In the context of African societies and cultures, the arts are inextricably linked to human life, to human behavior and the management of society. And when we recognize that people from Africa not just think but offer ways of seeing the world that are rich, complex and innovative, we will begin to appreciate their shared humanity and the equality of who they are. The very structure of colonialism was predicated on dismantling any such sense of dignity and value. It was part of a major push to dominate by any means and by all means it was an effective strategy. Denigrate a culture treated as barbaric, treated as without merit, treated as without history and precedence and then elevate the colonizing culture, treated as essential, treated as the most valuable and impose that on that culture that is being colonized. And what you have is a dominated and controlled society at the deepest, most nice thing last in psychic level. It may not seem to you that this history has any relevance to you or to how you view the world but every time I raise the issue of a partnership with African writers and African institutions and those that are here in the US, I'm met with puzzlement. I'm asked questions that would suggest that for these people I'm talking to the only paradigm of a relationship with Africa that we understand is one of aid, of charity, of helping them. And one of the toughest challenges that I've faced with Africa, the African Portrait Book Fund has been to suggest that what we are doing is not a charity but in fact an act of enriching the world by giving us access to the rich thinking and artistry of African arts and culture. I found it so much easier to talk about setting up libraries in Africa than to talk about establishing an African Portics Institute here in the US. Not as it turns out because of the assumed cost but because it is hard for people to see that this institute could contribute to the intellectual life of this community, this country. No one hesitates for an instance to imagine that China, Japan, India, Italy, France are sites of intellectual and cultural value that can enrich our society but Africa, this is a struggle. And how appalling it is that even in given this talk I have spoken of Africa as a single entity as if Africa is a country. I'm allowed to do that because I know that my audience is comfortable with a kind of totalizing view of a continent of 1.2 billion people of over 50 nations of thousands of different languages of histories that stretch back to antiquity and it's one of the many compromises that I have had to make to allow us to do the work that we are doing. Let's be clear. The reason that we have used the model for the publishing of African ports that we have is because publishers have been reluctant to invest immediately in the project and I mean that for every one of these books that is published I've had to find either $2,500 or sometimes $15,000 to offset the cost of the publication for every one of these books. So let's be clear again that the publishers that we are working with now the University of Nebraska Press were not the first ones we approached. We had meetings with many major publishing outfits in the US the list of publishing antises that we've spoken to secured meetings with, had long discussions with is impressive and sad but they said no and many said no even when we offered to cover the cost of publishing they said no even when we offered to take away the risk they said no even before they had been even though before they had been excited about the project and then they said no regrettably when they spoke to somebody because they questioned the quality of the work we were talking about or the quality of the editorial team we were introducing it's a long horrible list but I won't give you the list I'll leave that alone because this is being aired I may need to go back to them they said no because it didn't fit into their idea of what they did or what they thought they did so to Akashic books I'm extremely grateful and to the University of Nebraska Press of course I'm grateful but it should be clear that we do pay the subvention cost and we are seeing slowly that doesn't cover all the costs they are investing a lot of their time a lot of their skill and a lot of their own funding into making this happen and so this is good but the context in which this strategy has had to work is to force a publishing world to start paying attention so my point is that I remain acutely aware that much of the work that I'm doing involves battling on several fronts first there is the issue of poetry just poetry let's do poetry, let's talk about portics oh my god what is that what is the point it's not a bridge first there is the issue of poetry and it's relevant to anything valuable in the world this view is held by many and it crosses too many cultural and national lines and then after convincing people that the inspiration of poetry is important to our civilizations I then phase the matter of Africa after demonstrating that Africa produces great poetry and there is value and enrichment in creating the kind of dialogue that comes through publishing, translation scholarly study with African poetry so tellingly it's easier for me to secure support for our work with the African poetry libraries as I said then of course with anything to do with the work that we are going to do let me just move on so this brings me to the next stage that I see to be very important because as I said each year we publish these chat books this year there will be 10 chat books in there in 10 years we would have published about 90, 95 African poets who would never been published before this to me is exciting but it's not that remarkable because like I said it's a whole continent there's a lot of people secondly we are publishing individual collections of poetry so like as I said earlier about 40 almost 50 books of poetry have been published so far by in 10 years that number is going to continue to grow and we believe that's important but that's clearly not enough that's clearly not enough the vision that led to the formation of the African poetry book fund and that has led to the publication of almost 50 African poets like I said has focused primarily on ensuring that the work of African poets joins the global conversation about art and culture but a great deal more has to be done unless we create systems and institutions that engage this work as part of the academy there will be limits to the work that we are doing simply put if no one is writing about these poets thinking about what these poets are thinking about and placing the work of these poets in the broader context of African history and world history and the intellectual development over time we will be left with a shallow landscape for the work of African poets the academy namely places like the University of Nebraska are often described and dismissed as ivory towers that have no real bearing on the cultural landscape well they're wrong we continue to read Whitman in schools Shakespeare, Kafer and Dickinson because of the academy we understand literatures of antiquity because of the academy we retain our understandings of our present moment in most valuable ways because of the academy there is no sin in thinking there is really no sin in thinking and there's a great deal to be gained from reflecting and until we are able to bring the work of African poets and poetry and poetry and we you know to bear on all of this and we will only have gone halfway to where we are to go if all we do is just publish these poets and if we cannot translate work if we cannot show the value of the work if we cannot show that there is an aesthetic and cultural context that has helped to generate African poetry then we would have just barely made a dent into the great tragedy of silence these days the establishment of an institution committed to the study of African poetry and African politics has occupied my time and my head for the past two years a very comprehensive and detailed proposal for this vision has been circulating here in Lincoln and elsewhere and all of this work in the English department has been gratifying and important indeed a recent external evaluation of our department cited this project as one of those that deserve some support here at UNL. Vision is ambitious involves graduate study on the graduate study public lectures, conferences, think tanks crowdsourcing, intellectual discussions faculty and graduate student exchanges the publication of scholarship on African poetry the publication of translations of African poetry African politics and aesthetics deep into antiquity the expansion of our poetry libraries initiative in Africa the archiving of African poetry the gathering of various strands of African poetry through dynamic and expansive digital humanities projects that will connect major libraries archives and cultural institutions in Africa through the endless possibilities of the internet. It will involve the teaching of courses on African poetry the examination of African cultural popular culture through the lens of aesthetics. It will also involve the publishing of major anthologies of African poetry that will allow us to distinguish the various national and cultural strands of African poetry that exist. It is an expansive one but it's all planned out with careful strategy and already there's been interest in the work we are talking about. We've gotten funding from the Ford Foundation for some of this work and other places. So you should know that this work is driven by a small and I like to describe it as a nimble team made up of amazing poets and scholars who have all volunteered their time and their genius to make it happen and it's also been designed to add more and more organizations and individuals to this work to ensure that its impact is significant and lasting but it's work that has to happen and it's work that will take effort to take off I found that funding individuals and institutions respond to commitment, passion and what we call buy-in. That's what they trust and it is in this area that I believe the University of Nebraska might have some work to do. The African Poetics initiative is what I'm calling it now. It could be project, it could be whatever it is because we can't name it. It's perfectly poised to secure support because it is filling a gap that needs to be filled. It has already gained an interest and support from many entities and so I think we are sort of neatly and perfectly poised to make something exciting happen here if we will jump at this. The recent hires in English of three Africanists were prompted over two years were prompted by the noise around in this work and at this point we are looking at the kind of resources that could be extremely instrumental in making this continuum but of course this thing has to be named has to be owned and has to be perceived as part of the vision of this University as a whole and that is what I'm going to keep saying and saying until it happens. The truth is that engaging with Africa may seem like a way to avoid engaging with African American culture here in the U.S. There is a long tradition of this kind of thing but there is also a long tradition of African Americans becoming the key figures in the celebration of African identity and African culture as it impacts Africa itself. So people like Marcus Gaby, people like Langston Hughes people like W.B. Du Bois all of these people have had impacts on the identity of African Africanism over the years. The African politics initiative or project is at its core a Pan-African entity and it's led by people who understand themselves to be part of the global Africa. Our University can be a pathfinder and a leader in this kind of vision and this vision can be transformative here at this University, this state and in this country and then impacting the continent of Africa in positive and engaging ways. There is no exaggeration because already we are seeing so much of this happening. So I'll stop there, perfect, 340 and now I can take some questions. Thank you. Thank you very much Professor Dawes very very interesting at least for me, I don't immerse myself every day in the poetry and so it's been wonderful. This is a good time to for questions and from some discussions from the audience and if you can take the microphone off and I raise your hand and I'll bring it over to you or there's another one there. Thanks Kwame for the lecture. I was wondering can you fill us in a little bit more about sort of the institutional models that have inspired your vision or that analyze your vision that you see yourself you know to draw out even more the importance of this vision for the University of Nebraska and what it could be really, like how big of a thing it could be. Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, there are a couple of interesting things that have happened in American letters in the last 20 or so years. One of the things that anybody who's been even remotely interested in African American literature and African American literary history would have noticed that in the last 20 years we've been reading and studying and seen published the work of a lot of 19th century African American writers, memoirs and so on. And much of that work was prompted by the Du Bois Institute that was set up by Henry Lewis Gates at Harvard where he created this model that brought students, graduate students into the institute who would do work on specific writers and authors who had not been published or studied and then that work would be published and presented and these students would of course become granted scholars, there'd be scholars in that field. It changed everything. It's changed the way that we've looked at it. It's changed the anthologies that have come out and so on. So there are models in which study. There's an active relationship between a vision and a plan and the academic practice that is transformative to the landscape of scholarship that is taking place. We have a great advantage because of course we've got the two sides of it that we're working with the publishing of primary material, that is new work and so on, but we also have an opportunity to study work in ways that hasn't been done before. And another model that's very interesting which just happened recently in the University of Pittsburgh has been the establishment of the African American Poetry Institute. The Poetry Center I think it's called and this happened just last year. I think they stole it from us but that's alright. But no, it's a fantastic thing and I just saw recently that they had a fellowship that is going to support a fellow to come in there for two years to do research on African American poetry and politics. As I travel around the world there are some entities that do this work and do this kind of thing and it seems like we have a lot of the resources and a lot of the elements that could make that happen really effectively here. And I would dare say that it would become a pay setter for other ways in which this kind of work can be done. This is an invitation. As a member of the African and African American Studies Program I'd like to extend to you an invitation to come and talk to us about how our program can facilitate such an initiative as yours. Okay, accepted. That was easy. Thanks for the very interesting perspective on the world. So how much of the work that you publish is in English and how much in its original language and is translation a large barrier to what you're able to make public? Yeah, that's a really good question. We began purely in English and that was strategic. That was just because we were publishing in the US and this work has to prove to be economically viable and so we decided to start in English and start seeing the work being published in the States and it turns out that it is viable. In other words, nobody's losing money on this kind of work. But at the same time, we knew that long term we would start to do translation. So we have a book coming out next year by a poet called Guébo from Côte d'Avoire which is a translation by a guy called Todd Fredson, a wonderful Côte d'Avoire scholar and poet and so we have that lined up to come up. We're also in partnership with the Swahili book prize and we've agreed to publish any collection of poetry that wins the Swahili book prize in translation. Currently, the winner of last year's prize which is a collection of poetry is being translated into English. We plan to do work in translation from traditional African languages but also from languages that have a shorter tradition but exist whether it's in Portuguese, in French, Spanish and I guess a little African and so on. Translation is part of the one of the ways that we're thinking about it is to bring in people to do specific translations of important African texts, contemporary African texts and more historical African texts and ensure that they appear. Once we get digital and we get into the humanities then we will not necessarily be doing all this translation but we'll be presenting African poetry in all its dimensions and languages and so on. Good question. Thanks. Hey Kwame. I'm a big lover of poetry, contemporary poetry and I would invite you to speak about the range of work being published by African Poetry Book Fund, the range of styles the different backgrounds of all the poets it's a compelling aspect of the project that I'd like to hear you speak more on. Yeah, so you know a question that is often asked is tell us a little bit about what Africans are writing today and what's the school of poetry going on and we don't care. We do not care in all side of it we are publishing what is there and we want the scholarship to work out that mess. Whatever it is it's coming out. Let it come out and examine that work. Now I'm a scholar that's what I do but I can take it off and just say look we're publishing because as was suggested the range of work is so incredible. We're moving from work that clearly has been influenced by the spoken word environment to work that has been influenced by contemporary poetry styles people are doing some transliterations of African traditional languages and so on and the preoccupations I think are there and one of the fascinating things about the next box set, first of all we have 10 manuscripts 10 books that are coming out 9 of them are women and only one guy in that pool and the theme of the body the way that the body is engaged whether it's in Somalia whether it's in South Africa or Nigeria or whether it's in diasporal worlds in England or here in the United States these writers are writing about in powerful and interesting ways about language, about body and so on. So the range of work is fantastic and the quality of the work is remarkable I think our ports are getting awards, they're getting a lot of attention critical attention and so on and the reason is that they were there is just that they could not convince the traditional publishers to think that this may be something that they can publish believe it or not and yet now people are starting to pay attention so it is fantastic and it's quite exciting and I think it's exciting because again we're kind of spoiled because you talk about 50 odd countries and people voices from these different places with different cultures can give you a variety and a range that is immediate and is accessible to you and I think that makes it a wonderful and necessary thing that's happening. Hello Professor Marco was talking about models and I was wondering if there was a way as English department graduate students that we could bring this model to other universities so that it's on I can hear. So that other universities could help publish and it wouldn't be 70% reliant on UNL. Yeah I think there are ways to do that and I expect people will do that one of the things that I do a lot of we do have a whole mentoring system for instance when we publish a new book of poetry what you see in your hand is the product of a long period of mentoring of the sixth now it's about eight of us on the editorial team these are established major poets but we don't publish a book without partnering them with one of the editors and the editor works with that manuscript over a year or two to make that manuscript ready and to pay attention to it and then the work is published but that mentoring is a deal that we make and we tell them that the deal is if we do this for you when you are given the opportunity you will do this for other people. The idea of community sounds very unacademic but frankly it is the most fundamental part of the success of this work of people recognizing that they are supporting each other and making things happen that way and so those people who come and get involved in the African poetry book fund those students here and those from outside their role in passing that on to other places is built into the model that's the structure the structure is not for one press to publish African poets if that were the case if somebody threw a bomb in that place then that's the end of it and we don't want that we want it to be all over the place so that they keep rising up out of there this is sounding zombie like so let me not keep going but you understand what I mean they are all over the place so yeah. Thank you so much Kwame this is very exciting so could you tell us within the next five to ten years with the funding that would be available let's say you were able to get all the funding that you were hoping to get what would the next five to ten years look like? Yeah well the next time I would say the first thing is that we will continue to publish as we are publishing which would be that we will be publishing 10 to 12 poets a year we will be publishing anthologies as we go along we will see more libraries established throughout Africa the libraries are poetry libraries they are reading libraries they establish in partnership with organizations there I think the most important thing that I hope to see in ten years would be that we have active scholarship being published and being done and institutional exchanges that are taking place one of the interesting things that hasn't been done yet is to look at archives, libraries national libraries and national archives throughout Africa to see what exists in those archives in terms of poetry if you know you may call a library and say what do you have for poetry and they would say well we must have a lot of stuff but nobody has sort of sat down and said this is the poetry list that exists and so one of the jobs that we see necessary is to start doing that work so my hope is that in ten years time would have created a digital network a portal a digital humanities portal that allows us to see to have a longer picture of what has happened in the history of African poetry and its tentacles and as it affected the rest of the world and we're not that far from that because we've started to do that work already and I think that's going to happen and here at UNL I think we'll see more think tanks people talking to each other we'll see a lot of activity especially in the classroom and in terms of research that will relate to African poetry so the hope is to make it solid and not make it a fad alright you know that everybody's excited now but to make it solid and to seal it in I look forward to you coming to talk to African and African American studies I can't wait I'm sorry I missed the very beginning of your talk I was teaching until 315 so you may have said something about this so I apologize if I'm making you repeat yourself I'm imagining that there were more than a couple of naysayers to this project and so as we hear more about it and support it what can we be saying to the people who don't understand the vast importance of this project and if you said that already I apologize but I'd like to hear from you I won't make a general statement about that because it depends on what the objections might be so the objections vary in different ways some objections have to do with funding some objections have to do with fit and things like that I think my sense is the need for a kind of recognition of the vision of the thing just how exciting it could be right and I think we can you know this is the interesting thing without much effort we can become like the center of African poetry in the world just like that ok part of it is because nobody else is doing it but but when that happens you really become an effective leader so this is substantial and I think with greater excitement I think we can do it I think the struggle that I would have and we do want to alleviate and I think that's changing I'm hopeful is the sense that we are in this thing together as a university like this is something that we see and we get and we are all doing this thing together rather than just a bunch of people think this is cool for everybody else and I think we have a great opportunity as a university to kind of make this idea of being global like genuine you know and make it a genuine exchange this is the opportunity that we have and I have no apology about saying we need to work on that Hi Kwame I'm really great to hear you speak about this very exciting I have a two part question just because but it's related the first part is I know that we're doing this wonderful work here with the African Poetry Book Fund and the titles you published but for students who are really excited to learn about African poetry in addition to reading the books in the series where else can they find books written by African authors or books about African poetry where they can go and find out about African poets and the second part is I taught Chris Sabani's Hands Washing Water in my poetry class a couple of weeks ago and the students loved it they were really excited about it they had given a little bit of an introductory lecture about to contextualize it but they also said that they had to do a lot of googling to look up things that they may have not been familiar with culturally so which brought a question in my mind about as we begin to teach African poetic texts in the classroom what resources do we have for students and particularly teachers in teaching that work and if you could speak a few words to that yeah so on the first question the places that one has to go would be to go back a bit so Heinemann books for a while was publishing a lot of African poetry because before Heinemann stopped publishing African literature as an entity and so they exist in their archives in sort of their back ordering but nothing particularly new if you want to find African books by African poetry you would have to go searching to African publishers a few African publishers particularly in South Africa some in Kenya who publish occasional collections of poetry but again the problem is that there's not a whole lot but their venues there's a wonderful site called Badalisha Badalisha Poetry Exchange which is one of the most exciting sites of African poetry that there is and if you just go to the site it's beautifully organized and you can read poetry by these poets some of them in performance there's audio of them performing and so on and they've been gathering and gathering over the years they're based in Cape Town South Africa and they're probably one of the most interesting and exciting sites that exist that's a good resource and what your students encountered and I deal with this every day even with Prairie Schooner and with any kind of editing work that I do I do a lot of editing work and the question then becomes do we pretend as if we are living in a pre-Google age or in the Google age as we deal with referencing and making notes because the truth is today you can write a line in another language type it in Google translate and they get it immediately access to information for the moments where we just didn't know just think about it you remember the wasteland by T.S. Eliot some of you remember it fondly some of you not so fondly but anyway it's a kind of important book but there was a time when we depended on Eliot's notes which were notoriously misleading the little wonky he was being playful about it and so on so he was notoriously misleading us now he can't mislead us because all we have to do is google the thing and we go oh you idiot you could fool me and that changes the dynamic the question is do we expect to be a huge apocalypse when everything dies and there are no more computers and then we are stuck or do we expect this opportunity to continue with this multivariant multivariant voices and languages and allusions and so on because we know that people can look them up and that I think has opened up a great deal of possibility frankly the digital circumstance the internet the ability to communicate by email by all the different means has made this project possible the editors of the African Portrait Book Fund that editorial team it has never met and we have been able to do all this work on that basis and so that has changed everything and that has made all kinds of things possible so for me this is a good thing I'm excited about the possibilities of that and if it all dies then we will start again from scratch but right now this works just fine yeah call me yes me again also a two part question one is as you know there's a lot of talk at UNL about in terms of funding that what gets funded has to be somewhat mission critical to the university and one of the ways of defining mission critical has to do with the land grant mission of the university also so might you say a few things about that perhaps in relation to the community in Nebraska itself also the growing African community or communities I probably should say rather and then the second is and maybe I blanked when you perhaps you already gave this to us but as you know so we have been talking about poetry a lot but your vision is for African poetics poetics yeah and I'm not sure that everyone has a full sense of the range of what that means but the answer to your question is is just a new reality in the context of certainly Nebraska is an immigrant reality keep our fingers crossed on that one but so far so good there is a large and growing population of Africans from Africa who are here and I think there's a way in which our practice study and our engagement in that work is relevant to that community or is relevant to us as we work with those communities and I think we are therefore not sort of leaving we're not creating a new kind of area of study that doesn't have relevance to us in very immediate and practical ways and then related to this question of poetics I think one of the things that is important is that the word poetics and the word aesthetics are speaking of broader issues and some of the work that we are talking about would be looking at film looking at popular music or popular culture looking at religion how do these ways of thinking these broader ways of thinking first of all how can they be reflected in the work that we are paying attention to whether it's the literature itself that we're paying attention to all the practice of culture that we're paying attention to so in many ways the way that this project is designed this idea is designed is to connect with existing scholarly practices and existing interests that we have at this university and issues of place issues of religion issues of the historical connections rhetorical connections and so on we're very interested in all those things because the idea of aesthetics is a philosophical concern and that philosophical concern I think has great importance and value and that's built into what the work that we're trying to talk about the idea is that located in the complex of this African continent is a long history of intellectual engagement and artistic engagement and we are going to sort of jump into that so that we can learn from it gain from it and have exchange with it and that to me strikes me as exciting and I just don't think it's done enough and there's a long history of why that is the case but I think now we are at the cost of something quite exciting in that regard. Professor Dawes on behalf of the UNL Research Council I want to thank you very much for sharing your project work with us and it's been wonderful from my standpoint to learn about this process. I want to point out that our Chancellor Ronnie Green is here and I would offer Ronnie a chance if she would like to go to this. How are you? Good to see you. I wasn't supposed to be here today. I was supposed to be in China but you know we are under travel restrictions and that's it. So nonetheless Kwame thank you very much for your wonderful Nebraska lecture. First of all you can be assured that Kwame has been to see me already in my short time in the role of Chancellor to help me understand African poetics and your vision and your hope for this here at the university. I particularly appreciated Marco your last question and your response to that. Thank you very much. Give Kwame a great round of applause. And on behalf of the university to remember your Nebraska lecture this fall accept this gift on our behalf again, wonderful lecture. Thank you very much.