Villanova English Responds to @blackvillanova

Villanova English issued the following statement on Instagram in response to the Black at Villanova University account:

"The English Department urges all Villanovans to read the stories being shared on the @blackvillanova account, including posts that call out the English Department for instances of racism. We are listening, and we are committed to taking action to combat racism and white supremacy in our department and across campus."

Dr. Adrienne Perry wins Elizabeth Alexander Creative Writing Award

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Adrienne Perry, who has received the inaugural Elizabeth Alexander Creative Writing Award from the journal Meridians: Feminisms, Race, Transnationalism. Dr. Perry received the award for a prose composition entitled Lamaze, which will be published in the journal.

In their citation for the award, the judges wrote: "Lamaze is the story of two mixed-race sisters, growing up in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and grappling with teenage pregnancy, racism, alcoholism, and domestic violence. Summarized like this, the story sounds bleak; it is anything but. The sure, powerful voice of the narrator, 15-year old Adrienne, is utterly compelling as she leads us backward in time, peeling back layers of her family's experience to discover the almost magical heart of her love for her older sister. The judges were captivated by the quality of this narrative voice, paired with the rigorous and sophisticated formality of the story's structure and the way it complicates in subtle and meaningful ways, issues of race, sexuality, class, and gender in rural America."

The judges added: "The Elizabeth Alexander Creative Writing Awards celebrates "an author whose work embodies the lyrically powerful and historically engaged nature of Dr. Alexander's writing. The award aims to highlight different forms of knowledge production that emerge from the artistic, political and cultural advocacy for transformative change undertaken by women of color nationally, transnationally, and globally. Our goal is to make knowledge production by and about women of color central to contemporary definitions of feminisms in the explorations of women's economic conditions, cultures, sexualities, as well as the forms and meanings of resistance and activist strategies."

Just Published: Dr. Yumi Lee on Police Violence in Toni Morrison's Home

Congratulations to Dr. Yumi Lee, whose article, "Repairing Police Action after the Korean War in Toni Morrison's Home," was just published in the journal Radical History Review.

Dr. Lee's timely essay looks at the way Toni Morrison's 2012 novel Home links the violence of US military “police action” in Korea in the early 1950s to the long history of police violence at home. She argues that the novel's critical portrayal of the Korean War punctures two enduring myths with origins in the 1950s: the myth of a peaceful domestic “color-blind” society and the myth of heroic US military intervention abroad. In Dr. Lee's reading, Home is an allegory that invites readers to imagine forms of justice outside of a policing framework, both globally and domestically, through its narrative of repairing trauma and harm through community care rather than punishment or retribution. Morrison’s rewriting of the 1950s in Home therefore places the contemporary idioms of police and prison abolition and transformative justice in a broader historical and global imaginative frame.

Want to Learn More about Black Lives Matter? Villanova English Faculty Reading Recommendations

The Villanova English Department stands in solidarity with our Black students, staff, and faculty and their allies against anti-Black racism, police violence, and racial injustice.

The faculty intend to contact students with an action plan before the fall semester begins, and we will be asking for student input as we proceed. In the meantime, if you have specific suggestions or questions about our department response, please direct them to Dr. Jean Lutes, chair of our department Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee, at jean.lutes@villanova.edu.

As a first step in our response to the rising Black Lives Matter movement, we invite you to consider this reading list on white supremacy, policing, and racial justice:

• James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963) [available online via Falvey Library], and Raoul Peck’s 2018 documentary I Am Not Your Negro [available for purchase on Youtube and Amazon prime video]

• Angela J. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003) [also available online via Falvey]

• Claudia Rankine, Citizen (2014) -- Rankine read at Villanova during the 2019 Literary Festival

• Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (2016) [available online via Falvey]

• Reginald Dwayne Betts, Felon: Poems (2019) -- Betts read at Villanova during the 2017 Literary Festival 

Online Resources

On prisons, policing and punishment:

https://medium.com/@micahherskind/resource-guide-prisons-policing-and-punishment-effb5e0f6620

Breaking down the Prison Industrial Complex Video Project by Critical Resistance: http://criticalresistance.org/videoproject/

Reading Towards Abolition: A Reading List on Policing, Rebellion, and the Criminalization of Blackness:

https://www.radicalhistoryreview.org/abusablepast/reading-towards-abolition-a-reading-list-on-policing-rebellion-and-the-criminalization-of-blackness/?fbclid=IwAR2uIRH37EyEILfH4VsxTytcSsxOPOu29wQ9JU-StnsJkXthgF8_mAHg1qA

Black Lives Matter resources available through Falvey Library. 

“Geographies of Racial Capitalism” video and “Intercepted” podcast episode featuring Ruth Wilson Gilmore: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CS627aKrJI

https://theintercept.com/2020/06/10/ruth-wilson-gilmore-makes-the-case-for-abolition/

The #BlackCatholics Syllabus, curated by Dr. Tia Noelle Pratt: https://tiapratt.com/blackcatholicssyllabus-2/

And, to help make sense of all of this reading, a short essay, “What is an Anti-Racist Reading List For?” by Dr. Lauren Michele Jackson: https://www.vulture.com/2020/06/anti-racist-reading-lists-what-are-they-for.html