english | Kalamazoo College – Alumni Engagement

Looking forward for transcendence requires looking back with honesty. Essential to both: story sharing. Call that a blues sensibility. In November 1960 James Baldwin delivers a lecture in Stetson Chapel. Decades later the story of Baldwin’s visit inspires a timely story gathering. The voices are members of the Kalamazoo community recalling their experiences during the civil rights movement. The story gatherers are K students. That gathering effort—also known as “building the archive”—was a collaboration between Professor of English Bruce Mills’ senior seminar on James Baldwin and the Society for History and Racial Equity (SHARE), a local nonprofit organization founded by Donna Odom ’67. This K-Talk by those collaborators is fascinating, in part, because it’s far less lecture than it is story sharing, including, among others, stories from or about Harold Phillips, Walter Hall, Paul Collins, Robert Stavig, and, of course, James Baldwin. Mills and Odom and the other participants in this singular event show the power of storytelling to connect and celebrate diversity and to unite diverse individuals in the acts of imagining and then making a future that includes us all. The work’s neither quick nor easy, and needs that blues sensibility.

Resources

Wisdom Oral Project, an initiative begun by SHARE (Society for History and Racial Equity).
James Baldwin visited K for one week in 1960. You can read more about his visit in the Index (after opening the Searchable PDF (one file) (58.86Mb) scroll down to the November 12 issue.)
“In Search of a Majority,” the address delivered at Stetson Chapel in November 1960 and later published in Nobody Knows My Name.
“Notes of a Native Son,” the title essay from the book read by K students during Baldwin’s visit.

The Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership Assistant Professor of English Shanna Salinas elucidates two key ways to incorporate diversity into the United States literary canon. Diversity can be enhanced by expanding the canon to include more authors of color and various ethnic backgrounds and by reconsidering from different perspectives the works that have a long tradition of inclusion in the canon. In her remarks (“Mexico in the U.S. Literary Canon”) Salinas focuses on the latter, specifically the way a Chicano critical framework opens entirely new realms of meaning in The Awakening, a novel by American writer Kate Chopin published in 1899 and set in Reconstruction-era New Orleans.