remarks
Barbara Christian
I’m very proud and grateful to have been invited by Professor Taylor to remember Barbara Christian here today, with all of you; but I can’t help but feel that rather than me it should be one of my old schoolmates Gabrielle Forman or Sandra Gunning – eminent scholars who, like Professors Keizer, Livermon, Winters and Taylor and so many others, worked closely with Professor Christian. At the same time, I’m conscious of how it’s possible to be someone’s student even if you never took a class from them, even if your intimacy with them is confined to, but also released in, having tried to read them and to read along with them from the unbridgeable distance between Wheeler Hall (where the English department remains) and Dwinelle Hall (where African-American Studies used to be) and from the somehow more traversable expanse between, say, 1985 and today. Though I never took a class from her I was still able to work in the atmosphere Professor Christian somehow helped to sustain at Berkeley in the late 80s and early 90s and to work and study and play (a word she uses pointedly and to which I want to return) under her protection, which she enacted, only seemingly paradoxically, by leaving the Berkeley English department in the years immediately preceding my matriculation there. In leaving it, she didn’t leave behind the black students who came to that department in search of her and in her wake. Folks like Professors Gunning and Foreman, and Eleanor Branch, Keith Harris and Francesca Royster, and me, all engaged and remain engaged in various modalities of following in her footsteps, not only from Wheeler to Dwinelle, but also in those of Professor Christian’s footsteps that modeled an exodus we have sought and continue to seek to carry out and carry on, as a practice of abolition.
One way to understand Professor Christian’s refusal of the English Department is as a nonlocal instantiation of that same impulse that led the writer then called James Ngugi, along with his colleagues Owuor Anyumba and Taban lo Liyong, to call, in the late sixties, for “The Abolition of the English Department” at the University of Nairobi and, by extension, everywhere. At the same time, Ngugi’s and his colleagues’ assertion of a shift from a department of English to a department of literature branches from another shift Professor Christian had already been involved in before coming to Berkeley, when she and colleagues such as June Jordan, Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich – teachers of composition to the supposedly ineducable black and brown working class students of the City of New York, who tried to take advantage of open admissions to that city’s university – began to serve those students by finding the way back into the ground of literature, which is, as Professor Christian says, literacy, but a literacy immersed in sound, in orality and aurality and, more fundamentally, the general and generative sensuality of the shared experience of sharing. In that moment, as all throughout her career, Professor Christian bore the standard of a panafrican cultural insurgency that allowed, in her particular and special case, a flourishing exfoliation of literature in the wake of the digging, the tilling, the careful gardening of its conditions of possibility. Along with, but in a specifically feminist disruption and augmentation of her contemporary, Walter Rodney, Professor Christian’s groundings with her sisters and brothers and sons and daughters teach us how to read.
Though I am here, then, I hope, to represent the vast majority of her students, those who never took a class from her, I am blessed to be able to say that I breathed air that she made possible and that I heard the beautiful and critical and insightful sound of her own breathing on a special occasion or two, like the day when she delivered the lecture what we now know as “The Race for Theory” or the evening when she debated Ishmael Reed on the significance of The Color Purple, illuminating for him and for their audience the difference between Alice Walker’s novel and Steven Spielberg’s film. Of course, it has been for me and for most of us in her writing where the sound of her voice – so often attuned to the sound of our treasured writers as they record the sounds of the black social life they treasure – comes through in what she called “layered rhythm,” in a polyrhythmic complexity that demands her readers play with what she and they read together. This is how Professor Christian accompanies and complements Toni Morrison, refusing the distinction between criticism and fiction precisely in order to see how Morrison, in her turn, plays with, and against, Virginia Woolf and so that we, Christian’s readers, can join the choir she has joined and amplified, as it is itself in search of “the chorus of the community, living and dead,” that bears us and that we all bear, alive, unknown until its known in knowing. Listen closely to Professor Christian talking with Morrison until you’re ready to line it out and sound it out. Reading doesn’t get any more beautiful than this:
In your work, as in Virginia’s, inner time is always transforming outer time through memory. But since memory is not only individual, but merges with others to create a communal memory, outer time also transforms inner time. It is that reciprocity between the individual inner and the communal outer which your work seeks. The folk’s time, however, is not mechanical time, the march of years, which your chapter titles in Sula mock, but time, as it marks an event in human society but also in Nature, which for you includes the folk, as much as it means the seasons. The mythic quality of your worlds seems to be in opposition to many people’s concept of human history, when in fact history and myth have always been related, myth being a central part of any people’s history, history itself creating myth, time and timelessness in dialogue.
At her own unique but still ensemblic intersection of myth and history, Professor Christian brings the question of the world online. Right here, from everywhere we gather, at the end of this world and the beginning of every other, all the earthly way through the very idea, it’s cool to be together in the dis place/meant Barbara Christian plays. Right now, always, not sometimeish but timelessly, as we head off into the future in the present she still builds for us, Barbara Christian is right on time.
Remarks delivered January 25, 2021, in the Department of African American & African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. The occasion was a panel, “Barbara Christian and the Futures of Black Studies: A Roundtable with Her Former Students, Arlene Keizer, Xavier Livermon, Fred Moten, Lisa Ze Winters.” The panel was convened by department chair Ula Yvette Taylor.
Fred Moten works in the Departments of Performance Studies and Comparative Literature at New York University. His latest book, written with Stefano Harney, is All Incomplete (Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, 2021).