This year, our 12th, has been a mixed one for the Center. We lost one of our central figures, Professor Lundy Braun; began the pilot MA program in Integrative Studies, focused in Public Humanities; and ended the year with the December 12, 2024 opening of the ten-year-in-the-making exhibition – In Slavery’s Wake: Making Black Freedom in the World – in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Professor Braun joined the Simmons Center as one of its first research cluster chairs. For many years before, we had spoken about the ways in which the fields of medicine and medical care had been shaped by the legacies of American racial slavery. I had been educated by her work and was impressed by her deep commitment to understanding the science of biological/medical matters and their organic links to social life. She became chair of the Race, Medicine and Social Justice Research Cluster. She built this research cluster into a model one, making links across the university and drawing into the cluster faculty from across the university creating an interdisciplinary venue. I recalled that, when COVID began, she was able to put together a virtual panel of emergency doctors for the Center’s virtual series This is America which the Center hosted during the pandemic. The session was so impactful that local state medical officials got in touch with the Center requesting our help in educating communities of color about the pandemic. Part of Professor Braun’s work was to connect these officials to the doctors on the program. We at the Center will mourn her but we will also celebrate a life lived which recognized that medical science was about knowledge and practices best deployed in the service of others. It is something that all her students will attest to.
Since its inception, the Center has been committed to the field of Public Humanities — not as a discipline which could be described, in current language, as practices of engagement and public-facing. Such descriptions remove the field from its intellectual moorings and turn it into one which is understood as not quite scholarly. The Humanities are often considered to be just philosophy, art, literature, literary, performance, and theater studies — and sometimes history. These are all disciplines in which human cultures are studied. One question which is typically posed is: how does one define culture? Increasingly, thinkers like the late Stuart Hall have come to define culture as also human practices which create and give meaning to human life. Human practices involve many things, but a distinctive feature is how human life is itself a praxis. We live life. How to grasp life as it is lived requires many ways of thinking. To give an example, literature can be understood as one way in which we grapple with an interior life through the characters in a novel. But how does one grapple with the practices of that life as it expresses itself through dance, religion, and music? How do we study and grasp the ways in which museums collect the artifacts of life and display them — turning them into forms of representation. In the domain of history, how do we tell the stories of the marginalized, of those whose lives have been erased from history? With regard to the latter, in attempting to investigate these lives, do we not engage in forms of Public History which are about translation of a conventional historical work, but rather seek to tell historical stories which are enriched by the memories and stories of those who are alive or have passed? Public Humanities is an interdisciplinary field which creates ways of learning in which human life in its full complexities is investigated. For the Center, this has meant paying serious attention to forms in which we can reimagine and tell fuller historical stories about racial slavery and colonialism; creating a visual vocabulary for the telling of these stories and practicing, wherever possible, an ethos of reciprocity with various communities. Our new MA in Integrative Studies focused in Public Humanities draws from these practices.
For over ten years, the Global Curatorial Project catalyzed by the Center has been a major project engaging our attention. On December 12 and 13, 2024, the exhibition In Slavery’s Wake: Making Black Freedom in the World opened. It was a special moment: the culmination of a decade of collaboration between numerous partners and individuals. This project has been, for many years, our signature one. The accompanying project The Unfinished Conversation Series with its objective of creating a global archive of oral histories of the voices of the descendants of the enslaved and the colonized is almost complete and will be opened soon to the public in 2025. These two projects have produced new knowledge because they operated from the frame that the voices of the enslaved and the colonized not only have something to say but are critical and central to any understanding both of domination and fuller human freedom. This is the historical frame of the Center’s work.
And, in that regard, by the end of the Center’s 12th year we have come to realize that we might be at a crossroads. Regime changes in liberal democracies typically do not impact adversely upon the knowledge production work of universities. However, the recent regime change here in America has signaled that this liberal convention might not operate. For us at the Center, questions about historical truth-telling as well as that of contemporary justice are at the core of why we exist. In this moment, we will not bend from that core.
Finally, my deepest thanks to all the staff, faculty, students and friends who have supported our work over the past year.