 and where Wake Forest University was founded, as well as where it currently resides, is land that has served for centuries as a place for exchange and interaction for Indigenous peoples, specifically Sara, Kataba, Cherokee, and Lumbee in the Winston-Salem area, and Shakori, Eno, Sisapaha, and Okanichi in the original campus location. Today, Wake Forest continues to be a place of learning and engagement for Indigenous students, faculty, staff, and regionally, nationally, and globally, a wide community. Hello and welcome. My name is Dean Franco, and I'm Director of the Humanities Institute. Associate Director Amy Metham is with us, captaining this Zoom format. And I want to acknowledge Administrative Assistant, Kimberly Scholl, who supports all of our operations. Today's event is co-sponsored by the Slavery, Race, and Memory Project, led by Associate Provost for Academic Initiatives, Kami Chavis, and Dean of the Library, Tim Payett. Today's event is made possible by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The format this afternoon includes a lecture by Professor Roderick Ferguson, whom I'll introduce in a moment, followed by a panel discussion of Wake Forest faculty. Professor Ferguson will speak for about 40 minutes, and each of my three colleagues will have five minutes of response, after which we will attempt a more spontaneous discussion of topics. The event will wrap up around 6.15. Due to the very broad and quite large audience, we will not be fielding questions, we will use the chat box to share information about our participants. We've come together at a moment of considerable interest, obligation, and opportunity for the investigation of the function and purpose of the Academy in general, and for the development of African-American studies at Wake Forest in particular. Even as this university continues to research and document its entanglement with enslavement and segregation, a new horizon for research and teaching, especially in African-American studies, women's gender and sexuality studies, and across the humanities has become achievable. As those in the Wake Forest community know, we have had countless conversations, speaker and symposia, and faculty meetings toward thinking through how an institution such as this can best organize new knowledge projects to serve all of its community. So today's conversation is one of several intellectual investigations into the foundations of our work. On February 11th, Corey Walker will lead an event featuring Professor Ronald Judy of the University of Pittsburgh. And on February 23rd, the Humanities Institute will host Professor Gay Theresa Johnson of UCLA to talk about protest and public space. You will find updated information on these and other programs on the Humanities Institute's website. Turning to today's event, let me offer brief introductions and then let's get down to business. Our panel includes Will Mosley, the Mellon Assistant Professor in the Program for Interdisciplinary Humanities at Wake Forest. His research and teaching interests include black studies, queer theory, trans inclusive feminism, popular culture and transformative justice. Christina Gupta is an Associate Professor in the Department of Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies at Wake Forest with interests in the areas of contemporary asexual identities and gender, health and science. She is one of the coordinators of Wake Forward, a group of progressive Wake Forest faculty, students and staff pushing for institutional change. Cory G.B. Walker is the Wake Forest Professor of the Humanities and is jointly appointed in the Department of English and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Program. His research and teaching interests span the areas of Africana studies, critical theory, ethics, religion and public life and social and political philosophy. And turning to today's guest, Roderick Ferguson is Professor of Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies and Professor of American Studies at Yale University. In the academic year 2018-2019, he was the President of the American Studies Association. His research and teaching exists at the crossroads of or perhaps better, he has established the crossroads of gender, sexuality and race studies with transdisciplinary expertise in sociology, the humanities and the institutional history of the academy. He is the author of a substantial number of major works across these several fields, including just to name a few, aberrations in black toward a queer of color critique, the reorder of things, the university and its pedagogies of minority difference and we demand the university and student protests. Rod's work is generous and generative. And I can say that everyone I've spoken with who knows Rod has said the same thing about him, praising the person for his kindness and visionary leadership along with the depth and influence of his scholarship. I can think of no scholar better suited to help us think through all the many topics we have on the table, so I'm gonna turn it straight over to Rod as we launch our program. All right, my thanks to Dean Franco for this invitation and to Will Mosley for the inspiration for it. I would like to begin by acknowledging the indigenous peoples and nations, including Mohican, Mashantucket, Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Shatikok, Golden Hill, Pogacic, Niantic, and the Quinnipiac and other Algonquin-speaking peoples as the original stewards of the lands and waterways of what is now the state of Connecticut. I would also like to acknowledge the black people who labored on this land as enslaved people. In 1983, Toni Morrison's classic interview turned essay rootedness, The Ancestor's Foundation was published in Marie Evans's anthology, Black Women Writers, 1950 to 1980, a critical evaluation. In the piece, Morrison concerns herself with the figure of the ancestor in African-American literature. For her, the ancestor is a quote distinctive element of African-American writing, and because of this distinctiveness, the ancestor should be a central component of African-American literary criticism, end quote. She contends by saying, quote, it seems to me interesting to evaluate black literature on what the writer does with the presence of an ancestor, which is to say, a grandfather as in Ralph Ellison or a grandmother as in Toni K. Bambara or a healer as in Bambara or Henry Dumas. There is always an elder there, end quote. This elder, according to Morrison, possesses a certain symbolic and hermeneutical weight, quote, these ancestors, she says, are not just parents, they are sort of timeless people whose relationships to the characters are benevolent, instructive and protective, and they provide a certain kind of wisdom, end quote. On this occasion, I would like to turn to the ancestor as a hermeneutical figure that has been insisting upon itself, not only in cultural terrains, but in institutional ones as well. Here, I am speaking of ancestors as discursive figures within our institutions of higher learning. Indeed, the recent record of protests on our college campuses is confirmation of the presence of ancestors and our need to respond to them. In the following, I would like to take my cues from Morrison's essay in particular and black literary and intellectual production in general to take the first steps toward a hermeneutic by which we might analyze the various and often contending ancestral forces at work on our campuses at this moment. An institutional criticism, like the one that I'm calling for, is not really foreign to the university. Indeed, the ancestor as a discursive figure has always had a particular function in the modern Western Academy and in classical social theory. In the university and ruins, Bill Reddings implicitly identified this function when he wrote, quote, the reason it is necessary to reread, humbote, shiller, schliermacher, fit, and Kant is that the vast majority of the contemporary solutions to the crisis of the university are in fact, no more than the restatements of Humboldt or Newman, whose apparent appness is the product of ignorance of these founding texts on the history of the institution, end quote. With this, Reddings implies that the dominant ways in which we try to assess and attempt to fix the university betray our possession by a particular ancestral assemblage, that is how we are the unwitting heirs of Humboldt, Schiller, Schliermacher, fit, and Kant. In the language that Avery Gordon put to us in her classic book, Ghostly Matters, Haunting, and the Sociological Imagination, we are haunted by the terrains that these thinkers laid out for thinking and practicing the university. This assemblage of ancestors would set the grammar for the construction and continuation of the modern Western Academy long after their deaths. Locating these thinkers within the tradition of German idealism, Reddings argues, quote, the achievement of the German idealist is a truly remarkable one to have articulated and instituted an analysis of knowledge and its social function. They deduced not only the modern university but also the German nation, end quote. For him, these thinkers who brought philosophy, aesthetics, and history together yielded, quote, an articulation of the ethnic nation, the rational state and philosophical culture which linked speculative philosophy to the reason of history itself for almost two centuries of imperial expansion, end quote. On the way to thanking the terms of modern philosophy and aesthetics, these intellectuals conceived the modern nation state, the modern academy and modern national culture. These idealists may have wrongly presumed that ideas would change the world as Marx would argue in the German ideology but their ideas did in fact bring institutions into the world. Derrida reflected on this remarkable achievement by which thinking would berge institutions in his book, Eyes of the University. He wrote, quote, every text, every element of a corpus reproduces or bequeaths in a prescriptive or normative mode, one or several injunctions come together according to this or that rule, this or that sonography, this or that topography of minds and bodies, form this or that type of institution so as to read me and write about me, organize this or that type of exchange and hierarchy to interpret me, evaluate me, preserve me, translate me, inherit from me, make me live on, end quote. This remarkable achievement gave birth to institutions that would train us to organize and evaluate the world and in doing so, it would teach us to organize and evaluate ourselves and others. Imperial expansion to reiterate readings linked speculative philosophy, the academy and the nation state. In terms of the American colonies, the historian Craig Steven Wilder has demonstrated that American colleges were central to expanding colonialism through the dispossession of native lands and extending slavery through the exploitation of black labor. In the intimacies of four continents, Lisa Lowe has shown how modern liberalism and the colonial division of humanity gave birth to one another. We see this explicitly in John Stuart Mills on Liberty in his chapter of individuality as one of the elements of wellbeing. He argues, quote, there is only too great a tendency in the best beliefs and practices to degenerate into the mechanical. And unless there were a succession of persons whose ever recurring originality prevents the grounds of those beliefs and practices from becoming merely traditional, such dead matter would not resist the smallest shock from anything really alive. And there would be no reason why civilization should not die out as the Byzantine empire, end quote. Worried that Western civilization was getting too close to that of China, he said, we have a warning. Where progress was concerned, the Chinese, he argued, quote, have become stationary, have remained so for thousands of years and if they are to be farther improved, it must be by foreigners, end quote. The Chinese, he continues, quote, have succeeded beyond all hope in making a people all alike, all governing their thoughts and conducts by the same maxims and rules, end quote. In contrast, he asks, what has made the European family of nations and improving instead of a stationary portion of mankind, not any superior excellence in them, which when it exists, exists as the effect, not as the cause, but their remarkable diversity of character and culture. Individuals, classes, nations have been extremely unlike one another. They have struck out a great variety of paths, each leading to something valuable. And although at every period, those who traveled in different paths have been intolerant of one another and each would have thought in an excellent thing if all the rest could have compelled to travel his road, their attempts to thwart each other's development have rarely had any permanent success and each has in time endured to receive the good which the others have offered, end quote. For Mill, the European family of nations represents a long ancestral and racial line that moves toward progress. The modern Western Academy would be born from and partake of this ancestral story. Those institutions like the nations from which they came would present themselves as the catalyst for and measurements of human development. In her interpretation of Mill, Low suggests that Mill understood Western originality to mean the unique combination of free trade, liberal democracy and colonial government. Western man would become the symbol of this originality, the sum total of an ancestral assemblage. In his own discussion of the figure of man who co-would argue for instance, that man was not quote a phenomena of opinion but an event in the order of knowledge, end quote, serving as the ground for modern thought since the 19th century laying the foundation for the emergence of the human sciences. At the heart of how the West has spoken about itself, its philosophy and its institutions, there has always been an argument about ancestors. Indeed, these particular ancestors have proposed ways to interpret the world as well as institutions and social practices that can facilitate and corroborate those interpretations. As the representative and enforcer of those interpretations, Western man has operated as the ancestral sign of all that is supreme in human achievement. Part of his prerogative has always been to demand our identification. In her own discussion of the power and influence of this figure, Sylvia Winter has argued quote, our present arrangement of knowledge was put in place in the 19th century as a function of the epistemic slash discursive constitution of the figure of man. The unifying goal of minority discourse will necessarily be to accelerate the conceptual erasing of the figure of man, end quote. With that goal in mind, let us now turn to those gone, forgotten and unfamed ancestors as the basis of a long-awaited hermeneutical and institutional enterprise. Morrison's essay talks about the presence of the ancestor as another characteristic of 20th century black literature. She states quote, what struck me in looking at some contemporary fiction was that whether the novel took place in the city or in the country, the presence or absence of that figure of the ancestor determined the success or the happiness of the character. End quote, here the ancestor becomes an interpretive device for the critic in both literary and social assessments. Literary in the sense that it becomes a way of evaluating the particularities of African-American literature. Social in that the depictions allegorize one of the major transformations of African-American history, the movement of a people from rural to urban settings. Morrison suggests that the black ancestor becomes a center of gravity in the moment of social transformations and disruptions. It is significant that the literature that Morrison invokes arises in the post-World War II moment of minority insurgency through civil rights, anti-colonial and black power movements. Invisible Man was published in 1952 during the independence movements in Africa and the civil rights movement within the US. Tony K. Bombara's work arises at the end of the 60s when the civil rights movement begins to yield to the black power movement. The writer, Henry Dumas's Uber was written during the period bookended by civil rights and black power as well. Combined the anti-colonial, civil rights and black power movements produced an ethos to revive those ancestors that the Western ancestor of man attempted to overshadow and suppress. Touching on that revival, Stuart Hall would argue that you could not talk about the post-war world without also talking about the quote, moment when the unspoken discovered that they had a history which they could speak, end quote. As he said, quote, they had languages other than the language of the master, languages of the tribe. It is an enormous moment. The world begins to be decolonized at that moment, end quote. We might link Hall's and Morrison's arguments by saying that the minoritized ancestor becomes the metaphor for that discovery and the culture production that this discovery would promote. We must say that neither this discovery nor this ancestor would be engaged as a relic of the past but as a reconstruction for the present and the future. Hall said, for example, quote, it is not just the fact that has been waiting to ground our identities. What emerges from this is nothing like an uncomplicated, dehistoricized, undynamic, uncontradictory past. Nothing like that is the image which is caught in the moment of return, end quote. This was the moment for both invoking and reimagining the ancestor. If the figure of Western man was designed to promote certain prescriptive norms, the minoritized ancestors were imagined to upset those norms. The function of the minoritized ancestors was to deliberate on how certain taken for granted institutions and forms might be alternatively inhabited. For instance, in her discussion of the institution of the novel, Morrison argued, quote, when the industrial revolution began, there emerged a new middle class of people who were neither peasants nor aristocrats. In large measure, they had no art form to tell them how to behave in this new situation. So they produced an art form. We call it the novel of manners and art form designed to tell people something they didn't know. That is how to behave in this new world, how to distinguish between the good guys and the bad guys, how to get married, what a good living was, what would happen if you strayed from the fold, end quote. Morrison designates the novel as an inventor of and guide for an ethical formation suited for the new bourgeois class, a class that emerged in the wake of industrialization. The African-American novel and the figure of the black ancestor for her were ways of guiding a social group transiting into predominantly white institutional and social settings. As she says, quote, it seems to me that the novel is needed by African-Americans now in a way that it was not needed before. And it is following along the lines of the function of novels everywhere. We don't live in places where we can hear those stories anymore. Parents don't sit around and tell their children those classic mythological archetypal stories that we heard years ago, but new information has got to get out and there are several ways to do it. One is in the novel. I regarded as a way to accomplish certain very strong functions, one being the one I just described, end quote. This reinvented novel would be needed in the post-forward to moment in which the opportunities of black advancement were expanding. This expansion would directly impact Morrison's sense of why the black novel was needed. As she said, quote, the press toward upward social mobility would mean to get as far away from that kind of ancestral knowledge as possible, end quote. bourgeois ascendancy for blacks would potentially threaten those roots, but this jeopardy was in no way particular to black people. Recall that in the communist manifesto, Marx and Ingalls argued that part of what made the bourgeoisie a revolutionary historical force was its ability to end prior social relations. For Morrison, the novel was a means of intervening into a phenomenon that threatened the knowledge formations and culture production of black communities. The ancestor was central to the black novel's efforts, she implies, because the ancestor was a force that could help black people negotiate the disruptions of these social transformations. Talking about the function of the ancestor within the novel, she writes, quote, it was the absence of an ancestor that was frightening, that was threatening, and it caused huge destruction and disarray in the work itself, end quote. If the dominant ancestor represented by the figure of man was designed by Humboldt, Schiller, Schleiermacher, Ficht and Kant to effect certain responsibilities for developing the self according to the reigning principles of Western institutions, then the ancestors that Morrison invokes in black literature represented the need for responsibilities that would compete with those of their dominant counterparts. Put plainly, the minoritized ancestors proposed ethical and ideological discourses created to problematize bourgeois subjective and institutional transformation, particularly their alliance upon and production of racial and colonial hierarchies. They also called for institutional practices suited for that task. The ancestors made themselves visible in the post-war or two moment, as I had been arguing, we might think of the kind of reckoning with histories of slavery and colonialism happening throughout the global North in general and our universities in particular as the logical outcome of the ancestors' appearance. We might take inspiration from Morrison's engagement and call for a critical practice that asks how the figure of the minoritized ancestor can intervene in our academic institutions. In what ways can a critique developed for literature help us in the academy? In his foreword to stand with and for humanity, essays from the Wake Forest University, Slavery, Race and Memory Project, Corey Walker identifies the ethical stakes of your project. He writes, quote, the challenge remains to attain a style of thinking and a practice of living that consciously registers the in slash ability to confront the past in all of its complexity and density. Such a challenge cannot be met by mere affirmations of acknowledgement, declarations of recognition or politics of apology, end quote. Here, we might detect an ancestral presence calling for much more than the face-saving and brand-making maneuvers so typical of university administrations in their engagement with issues of diversity, inclusion and equity. As Walker goes on to say, quote, the task of the university is wrestling with the history that is all too present while inaugurating new practices of critical intellectual work and institutional transformation. This opportunity may escape our moment of slavery, race, justice and memory if we are insistent on erasing these critical moments as the opportunity to begin again, end quote. If the ancestor emerges at the crossroads in the moment of crucial transitions, then Walker's remarks point to this juncture at Wake Forest as one in which an assemblage of ancestors press us to consider what is our responsibility to this history and its force upon the present. The ancestor asks, consider all the ways that Western man has asked you to inhabit this place and ask yourselves what might be other modes of inhabitation, end quote. In the introduction to the conflict of the faculties, Immanuel Kant says something about how the university intends for us to inhabit it. He writes, quote, the university would have a certain autonomy since only scholars can pass judgment on scholars as such and accordingly it would be authorized to perform certain functions through its faculties, smaller societies, each comprising the university specialists in one main branch of learning to admit to the university students, seeking entrance from the lower schools and having conducted examinations by its own authority to grant degrees or confer the university, the university recognized status of doctor on free teachers, that is teachers who are not members of the university, in other words, to create doctors, end quote. Notice the sequence in Kant's remarks, the university admits it grants and it creates. Admission into these hallowed halls segues into the awarding of degrees and ends with the creation of people. One of my students astutely interpreted this passage by arguing that the university not only certifies expertise, it also bestows personhood. It not only promises the recognition for work achieved, it also claims a brand new humanity for us. This is the ancient and dangerous seduction of that dominant ancestral norm known as Western man, the one who mouths. We are here to show you that you fit within the established order of things. We've waited a long time for you. We've made a place for you at our table. Vincent Harding tried to tell us this in his essay, Responsibilities of the Black Scholar to the Community. He wrote, quote, Black scholars must remember their sources. And by this I mean no technically historical source. I mean human sources. I mean they were not created as persons, as historians, as teachers by Purdue University or UCLA or by the AHA or the OAH or any other set of letters. They are the products of their source, the great pain community of the Afro-Americans of this land and they can forget their source only at great peril to their spirit, their work and their souls, end quote. Here, Harding uses the ancestral source to displace the university as the origin of personhood, particularly for black scholars, rather than their intellectual deriving from the procedures of the university. He argues that it springs from an extra academic context. As such, their intellectual production and power in a rebuttal to Western man is not something the university can claim. As Morrison suggested, the ancestors in Harding's essay emerged to guide people through a transition and an inclusion. The essay is situated in the 1986 volume, The State of Afro-American History, Past, Present and Future, edited by Darlene Clark-Hein. The volume came out of a 1983 conference held at Purdue University, a conference that was sponsored by the American Historical Association. The conference was designed to assess the innovative work in African-American history that had just been produced in the mid 1970s by the fourth generation of African-American historians, a group that arose as a result of the political achievements of civil rights and black power. That volume contains an essay by the Dean of Black Historians, John Hope Franklin. Franklin wrote, quote, in the fourth generation of historians of African-American history, which began around 1970, there emerged the largest and perhaps the best-trained group of historians of Afro-America that had ever appeared. The Afro-Americans in the group were trained as were the white historians in graduate centers in every part of the country in contrast to those of the third generation who had been trained at three or four universities in the East and Midwest, end quote. Harding's remarks are designed to complicate a narrative of progress, a narrative that posits the fourth generation and their work as the outcome of the Academy's procedures, a discourse that hails them as the children of a set of letters. An ancestral discourse emerges in Harding's text, offering a life-saving council to the fourth generation. Granddaddy Willie Marvin, daddy's daddy gave me this council when I left home to go to college, a former sharecropper and grandchild of slaves. He, like so many other black parents in our rural Georgia community, has sent his children off to school and watched them return oftentimes as strangers. So after giving me a hug goodbye, he would grab me by the shoulders and say, still stay Roderick. Sitting on the yards of Morris Brown or Fort Valley State to see his daughters get their degrees was as far as Granddaddy got to any college. Even so, he knew something about the university and it's imposition of personhood enough to warn me about it. What observations did the builders, washerwomen, cooks and domestics have about Wake Forest and its manipulation of personhood and what messages might they have passed on to the younger generations? Even with the gravitas of Granddaddy's message, I have always appreciated his admonition that seemed filled with encouragement as well. Be careful but go and look at the work that awaits you, his admonition seemed to say. In black culture production, the ancestors come when encouragement is most often needed. There is a scene in Lorraine Hansberry's to be young gifted in black. You probably know the one I'm talking about. It's when a black woman intellectual, no doubt modeled after Hansberry herself is engaged in a spirited teta-teta with the white male intellectual. After hearing him go on and on about the guilt and racial megalomania of Negro intellectuals, she tunes him out and drifts into a reverie. And that's when the ancestors appear. I could see his lips moving and knew he was talking, saying something, but I couldn't hear him anymore. I was patting my foot and singing my song. I was happy. I could see the bridge across the chasm. It was made up of a band of angels of art hurling off the souls of 20 million. I saw Jimmy Baldwin and Leon Teane and Lena and Harry and Sammy. And then there was Charlie White and Nina Simone and Johnny Killins and Lord have mercy, Paul was back. Oh yes, there they were, the band of angels picking up numbers along the way, singing and painting and dancing and writing and acting up a storm. At this moment, the ancestors make themselves manifest to declare that our simultaneously ethical, intellectual and institutional charge is to pick up numbers along the way. This is an idiom of diversity that precedes and transcends any office within the academy. It is an idiom in which cultural and intellectual creation is both mass and minoritized production. And it is still our job to see and build that bridge across the chasm and to expose the institutional procedures that keep the bridge behind the veil. Like Morrison, I am interested in the ways that a black ancestral presence manifests in the writing often at the very moment that the university asserts its claims on our work. For instance, Harding addresses what he believes to be the African-American historians relationship to the pained community of black people he writes, in this age of the fourth, fifth, sixth generation of historians, scholars must certainly say as loudly and clearly through their work and their lives that this people has not come through this pain in order to attain equal opportunity with the pain inflictors of this nation and this world. No, I think that our community's pain is meant to open it toward the light. This is the responsibility to keep remembering that to be human, to say nothing of scholarly is to be constantly moving toward the light, end quote. Contrary to the claims of Western man, Harding argues, a new responsibility is needed, a responsibility that sits as its campaign that of addressing historical trauma and developing a faculty that is learned in how not to carry the trauma on. In her own essay in Black Women Writers, Tonicade Bambara asked quote, is it natural, sane, healthy, wholesome in our interests to violate the contracts slash covenants we have with our ancestors, end quote. Clarifying the way this question operates in her novel, The Salt Eaters, she says quote, insult most particularly in motive, content, structure, design, the question is, do we intend to have a future as sane, whole governing people, end quote. The ethical charge of the minoritized ancestors is the development of academic communities in which people own themselves and are not owned by the prescriptive norms of disciplinary or institutional belonging. Their work is marked by an imprimatur that does not belong to the stipulations of the academy. Just as there is man always, there is an ancestor. In her book, The Difference That Aesthetics Makes on the Humanities Act, the man Candace Chew calls for an illiberal humanities, one that quote, bears the promise of gathering a critical mass constituted in and by an undisciplined relationship to the university, end quote. I hope that it is clear by now that the ancestors that I have imagined are endowed with this very demand, tasked with ushering into being modes of intellection and institutionality that are diverse and non-aligned, modes represented by as yet unimagined multiplicities and the most productive soverities. The question before you at Wake Forest is beyond the acknowledgements and apologies, how will knowledge and practice be reorganized after the ancestors have had their say? Thank you. I am levitating with intellectual energy from that talk, Rod, I thank you. I'm assuming there is a roar of applause breaking out one by one in people's living rooms and on their coffee tables. We're going to go straight to a panel's discussion now. Each panelist has five minutes to more or less respond or respond as they in the grain of their work as they've been developing it. So we start with Will Mosley. Yes, hi. Allow me to begin by thanking the Humanities Institute for this very gathering. Amy and Nino, my sister and I, but twice for which I am currently grateful. Once a year ago, exactly, he had met for my first meal in the river during which I met with the handsome man of my item heroes, Rod Ferguson. This night, the key that I met with Rod, Rod's work makes clear that the task is to be a numerical measure of communication and performance of policy, destructive what he terms in the reorder of things, the will to institutionality, and the will to do that up as in the revolutionary river that played dynamic institutions in the last century, Rod was so administrative for his research as to the positional and redistricting difference. At the same time, the administrative power had to affirm different administrative institutions. The most affirmation, simply in the construction moment, was refused to be a meaningful look at the blackness in the institution, review the ways in which to be making full place with memory and core to a tangible project, to be able to create a greater diversity that knows indifference by time and emotion. I guess this holds to the contrast with the core of the world, for a silent meaning of having a consciously rest to be inviolable. Are we okay? But exactly how does one do that? Well, precisely by rebuking the notion that there is any one who changes, learns or heals on their own, let alone to the benefit of their community, Rod reminds us that within the intellectual project of African American literature, the inclusion of ancestors is not a strategy for making slavery, race or memory devices of rhetorical flourish. Ancestral knowledge, the presence of history embodied is generative here, but only if we are willing to authentically maneuver with that kind of knowledge in mind. As Rod suggests, quote, the African American novel and the figure of the black ancestor were ways of guiding a social group transiting into predominantly white institutional and social settings, end quote. As a reader of black feminist literature and as a faculty member of the very institution at the center of a conversation, I am delighted that Rod would invoke one of my favorite books to return to, The Salt Eaters by Tony K. Bambara. In the book, a local civil rights activist by the name of Belma is recovering from attempting suicide and finds herself in a facility not treated by medical doctors but by the local root worker, Mini. The opening pages are instructive of the moment we are currently grappling with. They read, are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well? I'm just asking it all. Mini Ransom was saying, playfully pulling at the lower lip till three different shades of purple showed. Take away the miseries and you take away some folks reason for living, their conversation pieces away. I can feel, sweetheart, that you're not quite ready to dump the shit. Got to give it all up, the pain, the hurt, the anger and make room for lovely things to rush in and feel you full. Mini waited till she got a nod out of Belma. But you want to stomp around a little more in the mud puddle, I see, like a little kid before you come into the warm and be done with the mud, end quote. Bambara describes a path toward healing as anything but straightforward, solitary or comfortable. As an allegory of the healing process in which true healing begins and ends with ancestors, the Salt Eaters describes the difficulty of living outside of our coping mechanisms or as Rod argues, the problem of allowing the institution to self-assess, self-diagnose and self-congratulate for a job well done. Despite a history of helping those in need of being a pillar of the community who has helped the less fortunate, Belma and Wake Forest are now in the position of needing help, which they find extremely uncomfortable. The Salt Eaters asks us to consider ourselves as part of a community in which we play different roles at different times. More importantly, every institution, every character in that book, from the townspeak to the ancestors to the healer, at one point or another, had to surrender to the facts of their wounds, witness the extent of their traumatic impact to their community and allow others more knowledgeable to step in to sort out the mess. Perhaps like Belma, Wake Forest will to institutionality, its desire to remain a pillar in the eyes of a community despite itself makes it difficult to surrender to healing, to reckon with its own woundedness. To this end, I want to ask, what would it look like to Wake Forest to read Belma's literature, to be open to a process of transformative justice and action and abolitionism? As an instructor, I'm more than a borrower who's looked at our students, our men, our women, our children, our knowledge simply beyond what the, in the rhetoric of the institution to normalize the un-malizable. This work is the signature of the community that we discussed earlier. We're going to turn to Christina Gupta now. Hi, everyone. Thank you very much. I'm going to put, hopefully, this will work a link to my remarks in the chat for accessibility purposes. So to speak of the reorganization and knowledge of knowledge and practice, in these remarks, I'm going to focus on Wake Forest's efforts to revise its cultural diversity requirement. So Wake Forest College adopted its current cultural diversity requirement in 2002, at which point there were 74 approved CD courses. In the undergraduate bulletin, the current requirement simply states, quote, all students must complete at least one course that educates them regarding cultural diversity, end quote. Today, there are more than 250 approved CD courses, and for years, faculty and students have questioned the meaningfulness of the requirement. Recently, as a part of a comprehensive core curriculum review process, a college committee recommended replacing the cultural diversity requirement with a set of requirements called 21st Century Citizenship Requirements. The use of the word citizenship in the title was a red flag for many of us. While I'm sure that the committee's intentions were good, the use of the term ignores the exclusionary practices associated with citizenship, as well as the trauma that may be associated with that term by undocumented students in particular. The committee's proposal has three relevant parts. The first part titled Cross-Cultural Analysis requires students to explore cultures and societies from non-Western civilizations. It does not require students to learn about colonialism, Orientalism, or predatory global capitalism. Rather, learning about non-Western civilizations becomes a way for students to learn about the other. Framed in this way, the requirement risks reinforcing the exotification of non-Western communities and the reification of the non-West as the ultimate alien other. The second part is titled Diversity and Community in the United States. Well, this part does require students to learn about, quote, structures that inhibit inclusivity and diversity, end quote. The requirement overall uses the hollow language of liberal multiculturalism, critiqued by Dr. Ferguson and many others, rather than the language of white supremacy and other systems of injustice. The third part titled Ethical Inquiry focuses on human values, character, and conduct. While much depends on how this requirement is implemented, we have good reason to worry that this requirement will, in practice, translate into the mandate that all students learn Aristotle. Given these and other concerns, members of the Progressive Campus Organization Wake Forward have asked the dean's office to form a new committee, composed of those with academic and experiential expertise in social inequality, critical race theory, and white supremacy, to develop a new proposal for replacing the CD. The consciousness-raising effects of recent protests against anti-black police violence and white supremacy have given us a unique opportunity to push for a new requirement that could give our students a substantive education in social, political, and economic inequality, including a specific focus on anti-black racism and white supremacy. The question before us is, can we craft an institutional requirement that does not merely include minoritized subjects but promotes the redistribution of material, social, and political resources necessary for liberation? It is clear to me that such a requirement cannot rely on the language of diversity and inclusion. Instead, it must teach our students about systemic injustice locally and globally. The requirement should also give our students the tools needed to transform unjust systems. The university would also need to commit to protecting the faculty teaching these courses, many of whom are likely to be faculty of color and other minoritized faculty. Faculty teaching a required course about systemic injustice and white supremacy will face significant pushback from students and will need significant resources and institutional backing to succeed in their pedagogical objectives while maintaining career growth and well-being. A requirement that focuses on systemic injustice is the kind of requirement that I think we need. Even so, I'm not confident that such a requirement will be transformative. Institutions are remarkably capable of disciplining and appropriating even the most resistant initiatives. Still, I think it is worth a try. To cite Dr. Ferguson's work in the order of things, we must attempt to, quote, critically deploy those modes of difference that have become part of power's trick and devise ways to use them otherwise, end quote. If you are not already involved in these conversations but would like to be, please contact me. I will put my email in the chat. Thank you for your time. Thank you, Christina. And now we turn finally to Professor Corey Walker. Thank you, and thank you, Rod, for your engaging and elegant lecture and for extending an invitation this evening for us to think with you on this important subject. In response, I gather my thoughts under the theme on ancestors, archives, and authority. The ancestors have always pressed the university, witness our continued wrestling, or shall we say haunting, by Immanuel Kant and Wilhelm von Humboldt, and our constant elaboration of the ideals of the university, which have been variously expressed by Cardinal Newman in the mid 19th century, Clark Kerr in the 20th century, to Rod Ferguson in our own moment. Yet Rod's critical return to the ancestor inspired by Toni Morrison is so very precious for a number of reasons. All too often, contemporary critical engagements with the university as idea, ideal, and institution re-inscribe us within the logic of the saying. This is the impossibility to thank the university as well as to thank the ancestor. For our thinking merely seeks to host the ancestor within the calculus of the saying. Indeed, as Jacques Derrida reminds us, quote, one cannot thank the possibility of the modern university, the one that is restructured in the 19th century in all the Western countries without inquiring into the event, that institution of the principle of reason. And it is this reason and its authorization of its ancestor in the figure of man that contains, categorizes, and constrains the possibilities of the university. Not one within the horizon of the given, but one which is la venir to come. In this respect, the ancestors are always already present in the order, organization, and institution of knowledge and become a basis, as Rod reminds us, of a long-awaited hermeneutical and institutional enterprise. This is what Octavio Paz reminds us when he excavates the semi-realities of the modern Western world and tells us that they were filled with poets, proletarians, colonized people, the colored races. All these purgatories and hells lived in a state of clandestine ferment. One day in the 20th century, the subterranean world blew up. The explosion hasn't yet ended and its splendor has illumined the agony of the age. A university to come is born of a pursuit of a form adequate to a representation of knowledge and a repository of thinking appropriate to the ancestor. The authority of the form is linked not to a singular modality of institutionalization nor to a disciplinary configuration of the university but rather to a transmission of knowledge that permits a mode of questioning, of questing, of engagement, of inquiry. In the eloquence of the Scribes, Ayik Royalma writes, the ancestors may be contacted in books, songs, prayers, proverbs, music, ritual and art. The souls which wishes to receive inspiration makes a habit of visiting these sites of ancestral existence, to ask questions, to listen and to read, to analyze and to sip. After that, having nourished itself with insights from the ages, courage from beloved ancestors and clear-eyed observations of the present reality, the creative soul can go to work. Arma underscores the epistemological, institutional and ethical demand of the ancestors. It forces us here at Wake Forest to truly think an ancestor and a practice in confronting what literary critic Cheryl Wall, who recently joined the ancestors, observed about the poverty of thinking Maya Angelou. And remarking on the tributes that accompanied her passing in 2014, Wall writes, the overflow of tributes to the transformative power of Angelou's art and persona contrast sharply with the relative dearth of academic criticism, indeed, Angelou's distinctive choice of the form of autobiography for her artistic craft propels her forging a literary art from the materials of experiences at the center of freedom movements on two continents and the artistic upsurge that was part and parcel of those movements. She thereby cultivates a practice that infuses these episodes with themes and tropes that thread through the African-American literary tradition. This is a knowledge that comes from without but dwells deep within. It is this discovery that Toni Morrison responds to when she reflects on the event of Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Cage Bird sings and their 40-year friendship. I have not seen that kind of contemporary clarity, Morrison remarks, honesty, and the sentences that were more than what happened, but how, I took sustenance from that. How we choose to remember is intimately linked to regimes of authority. In other words, as we remember our ancestors here at Wake Forest, how do we remember? Who do we remember? With what knowledge? It's this, if this is a university that aspires to pro-humanitate. Who are the ancestors in our moment? What archives of flesh, texts, and memory? What authority do they establish in the order and organization of knowledge in the university? Perhaps we must think again the ancestral figure of Maya Angelou when she states, I'm learning the form. I am molding the form. The form is molding me. What I'm trying to do is very ambitious, very ambitious because I am trying, I hope, to lay a foundation for a form, a form for ancestors, a form for the foundation of a university, a form for a Wake Forest University. This question before you is, beyond the acknowledgments and apologies, how will knowledge and practice be reorganized after the ancestors have had their say? With Rod, it seems to me that this question is most critical now and for the long future. Thank you. Thank you very much, Corey. I would like to invite Rod to respond first and then perhaps other panelists can chime in. I'm so moved to, especially Corey, by your emphasis on the how we remember and not only the who. I think the university and many universities are involved in the project of identifying the who, but the work of the how is really very significant and Rod has been addressing this work since 2015 with the reorder of things. So I'll start with Rod and anybody else who wants to chime in after him, please do. I'll just say that, one, I'm very moved by this discussion. I don't know that I've had such a sustained discussion about the function of ancestors in an academic setting like this. When it happens with this colleague or this friend who I trust enough to have the conversation but to actually have space where the ancestors are dressed as an epistemological entity and also as an ethical entity that is still pulling at us sleeves. This is a new experience. I wanna thank you for this. It also strikes me that it's an interesting moment for all of us to encounter ancestors at this moment. If you go back to what I was saying in my reading of the Morrison that the ancestor emerges and also of Harding that the ancestor emerges in a moment of transition, which is also then a moment of danger. What is it about this moment? Not just for Wake Forest, but for all of us, whether we're talking about Yale and the student protests of 2015, but even before that, the shattering of the stained glass homage to slavery in Calvin, formerly known as Calvin College here at Yale. Or if we're simply talking about the way in which the ancestors emerge in our popular culture right now. I've been watching with a great deal of interest that TV show by Misha Green and Jordan Peele, Lovecraft Country and the role of the ancestors in that show. So it's an interesting moment for all of us to think about what is it about this moment that the invocation of ancestors is so powerful? What are the urgencies named and unnamed that make that invocation so necessary? Maybe leave it at that and then invite Tyler. Yeah, I want to note Corey had to leave because Corey being Corey, he has another event that started at six, a launch of his own book. So we're not in Corey right now, but I'll turn to Christina and Will. Would either of you like to step up and respond in kind? Yeah, I'll go. I agree with you, Rod. This is usually a conversation that oftentimes happens after books are closed and we are wrapped up with our grading, right? So I'm very thankful for this. And I'm kind of caught between the optimism of Corey's words and the deep cynicism I harbor personally around what does ancestral knowledge and the practice of it look like out in the open. It is oftentimes a private practice, right? And so I'm kind of caught by the kind of making of projects of slavery, race and memory into packable units that are endorseable across several different offices across the campus, right? When in reality, I kind of think about this in terms of like Tony Morterson's beloved and a sermon and declaring where we're asked to kind of, she is asking us to lay our burdens down. And it's not a matter of leaving the mess there, but it's a matter of witnessing and acknowledging that mess. And so in this moment in which we are kind of neatly codifying our history, history that kind of defies and disrupts linearity and also has such a insistent presence, right? I'm thinking about Sadiah Hartman here. It just kind of, I'm kind of caught between optimism and like a deep cynicism around what does it mean to hold these two things at once, institutions and ancestry? I very much hear that, Will. And I think as I mentioned in my comments that I think that there are things worth trying in regards to the cultural diversity requirement, but that I am uncertain if those, even if we sort of implement our best plan, if that will have the kind of transformative effect on the university that we want it to, or if it simply will be disciplined and become yet another way of legitimating the institution through the incorporation of diversity and minoritized subjects. So I echo your not, neither, maybe neither optimism nor cynicism but I do think that we have, this is a kind of, lots of things are coming together at this particular moment that would enable us to even potentially enact such a requirement that we wouldn't have been able to, I'm not saying it's gonna be enacted the way that we want it to, but I don't think it would have been possible at another time to even consider it. And so I think it's about local things that are very specific to Wake Forest that give us this moment. So our history with in just some recent years in terms of the yearbook photos and the student protests that that initiated and the faculty activism that that initiated and then leading to things like the Slavery Race and Memory Project and the President's Commission on racism, no, race, community and equity. I'm sorry. And among other things. And so that local, what's going on locally obviously is informed by the national. And then again with even with the pandemic and the kind of rethinking of things that that has allowed for our forest on us as well as obviously the, as I mentioned the consciousness raising effects of protests against anti-black police violence and white supremacy. I think all of that coming together is maybe giving us an opening here that we can at least try to use in transformative ways. I wanna gather two threads and maybe hand them over to Rod for comment. Threads that I've been hearing. One is hearing that will speak. It's clear to me that institutions discipline knowledge. On the one hand, I think there's a strong critique to be made and has been made from Rod and others about institutional interdisciplinary, right? But on the other hand, I'm also hearing and I'm actually seen performed by Rod's own talk a kind of transdisciplinary gathering of knowledge and methods and sources and archival materials. And so when we talk about the how that we do this work there seems to be a kind of horizon of transdisciplinarity waiting for us. I wonder if that is something we could talk about. And then the other thread to talk about is in addition to our ancestors, I think Will and Christina both gesture to our students the next generation to come who on this campus have been real drivers of the conversation and the work, the good work that's been done. We are pledged to end around 615. So that's right around where we are. So I wanted to maybe ask Rod to comment on both or either of those threads. That is, what's the role of disciplinarity or transdisciplinarity for this kind of work? And then how do you think about students in addition to ancestors? Yeah, I mean, I think that for me what I take the sort of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary question first. You know, when Candace Chu says that it is about producing a critical mass of the undisciplined, right? I mean, I think she's absolutely right. Like that has to be the goal. We should not though think that simply because someone is located nominally within an interdisciplinary setting that they are actually part of that critical mass of the undisciplined because there are plenty of people in interdisciplinary departments and programs who want to turn them into disciplines, to establish cannons, to use them as ways to signify legitimacy to the university So then, you know, what Candace is talking about and what I'm also talking about and what I hear you also getting at, Dean, is H, you know, a formation that is not reducible to the given institutional logics. It lives something else other than the institutional logic. Like it lives it in the writing. It lives it in the classroom. Where, you know, for instance, you know, I'll say to students who want to work with me as graduate students on their dissertations. And you know, I, at some point, beginning of middle will say to them, I am not the person who can teach you, you know, how to imitate a discipline. That is not my job, you know. So you need to really consider whether I'm the person for you. I am the person who will urge you to learn as much as you can about the discipline so that you can think beyond the discipline. You have to know the discipline better than the discipline knows itself so that you can arrive at something that the discipline never intended, you know. You know, in other words, to try and insert into the everyday practice of teaching and advising. What you're calling the transdisciplinary, what Candace calls the undisciplined. You know, so that's one. In terms of, you know, students, I think that there's our opportunity, right? You know, because the model of teaching has been so organized around disciplining them, you know, into the existing logics. It is completely within our power to produce other kinds of teaching, you know, that don't make disciplinary fitting them within the discipline, getting them to pledge allegiance as its goal, that is completely possible, you know. The effort to, if you think about the conflict of the faculties and the job of the lower faculty, he says it is a job of the lower faculties to produce the uncritical agents of the professions, right? That is a historical event within the history of pedagogy. We can have other events, you know, besides that one. Rod, I wanna thank you for that answer. I wanna thank you for this talk and for your engagement with our topics that you address slavery, race and memory in particular has given us how much to think about. I wanna thank Christina and Will and Corey for their really excellent, very brief and yet so full presentations and then participating in this discussion. My thanks always to Amy Metham who organizes, leads, keeps things going so utterly effectively. And my thanks to the audience for being here and attending to this talk. This will be, this has been reported and it will be archived on the Humanities Institute website so people can go and see whatever it is they missed or what they wanna hear again. So I thank you all. Thank you so much. Good night, Ted. Thank you very much. Thank you, thank you.