Faculty at three of New Orleans’ historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have formed a reading group focused on the work of scholar Saidiya Hartman in preparation for her visit to Xavier University on March 18. 

Professors at Dillard University, Xavier University and Southern University at New Orleans (SUNO) have collaborated with the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities to promote the Black scholar’s work by forming reading groups to foster a community of Black New Orleanians  who discuss history, literature and identity.

Hartman, a professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and an award-winning author, writes about Blackness, the lingering effects of slavery and womanhood. In 2019, she won a MacArthur Fellowship — a so-called “MacArthur genius grant” —  for her work. The prestigious award came on the heels of her 2019 book “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals,” which used archival research to explore the lives of Black women in American cities during the early 20th century. 

Reading group sessions are open to the public. The groups are aimed at those who have read the books and articles that are being discussed, but welcome those who have not, SUNO English Professor Robert Azzarello told Verite News. Azzarello will be leading the next session at SUNO’s Arts, Humanities, and Social Science (AHSS) building this Friday (Nov. 15) at 4p.m.

“I do think a reading group creates a sense of intellectual community — not only intellectual community, but emotional community as well,” Azzarello said. 

Kim Vaz-Deville, scholar-in-residence at Dillard, led the effort to organize the reading groups after learning Hartman had not been invited to many HBCUs.

“I learned that she [Hartman] had not been invited to an HBCU,” Vaz-Deville said. “And I said, ‘Well, we’ve got three in our city, so we’ve got to change that.’” 

“So much of the new intellectual ideas are coming out of the East Coast, especially the Northeast, that knowledge sharing sometimes gets overlooked [in] the Deep South, where many of the HBCUs are concentrated,” she added in a later interview with Verite.

In April Vaz-Deville  contacted Azzarello at SUNO, English Professor Robin Vander of Xavier University and former Louisiana Poet Laureate Mona Lisa Saloy of Dillard University to organize sessions based on a different work of Hartman’s on each campus. 

The first session was hosted at Xavier on Friday, Oct. 25 and focused on “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments,”. Saloy described the book as “inspiring”.

“The more scholars, the more authors, the more journalists that give women a better shake,” Saloy said, “Hopefully people learn that women deserve a fair shake, that they deserve equal rights, that they deserve control of their lives and their bodies, and that their stories must be told well and thoroughly.”  

This week’s session will be focused on Hartman’s 2007 work “Lose Your Mother,”a book about Hartman’s journey to Ghana. The meeting will start with a tour of the African Art Collection at SUNO’s Museum of Art. Azzarello says the book has themes that are “universal”. 

“She does speak to sort of a universal kind of homelessness or unsettledness that does spring from the calamity of human history, but trying to find peace in that calamity, trying to find a home in that homelessness,” he said. 

Vaz-Deville wants this type of work — collaboration and discussion around literacy — to go on in the future to break down walls across disciplines and universities.

“We hope to continue this kind of series into the future so we can harness the strength of all three HBCUs to give our faculty, our staff, our students in the community access to the rich ideas that are in the work of…important scholars that often don’t get to the HBCU community,” Vaz-Deville said.

The reading group will also meet Friday, Jan. 24, 2025 from 6 – 8 p.m. at the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities and Wednesday, Feb. 19, 6 p.m. at Dillard University ahead of Hartman’s visit to Xavier in March, where she will give a presentation on her previous work and meet with students.

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