Brief Summary of my Research Statement

I grew up in the South – in the Mississippi Delta – where the racial tension clinging to the air can be as thick and uncomfortable as the humidity. For much of my childhood, that racial tension was an enigma until I read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. I was fifteen when Scout Finch taught me about racial injustice, and I was horrified to learn that the fiction was a social truth. However, I did not look away from the horror. Instead, I wanted to know what caused it. Authors like Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Flannery O’Connor, and Toni Morrison have shown me the south’s condition that is also the nation’s condition: the south and the nation are mentally ill—sick with racism. If Slavery has shackled the South with racism, then Jim Crow is the night rider who enforces the south’s chains of bondage and the nation’s systematic racial oppression. Hence, the nation is divided along the color line. Upon realizing that there are two nations (one black and one white), I became interested in identifying conversations taking place between the texts of white southern authors and black authors.

Essentially, my research interest is summarized in my article, “Blackness in White Ontology,” which synthesizes global conversations about ideology and African identities. The article bridges Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, Roland Barthes, Anna Julia Cooper, critics from the Black Arts Movement, and Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o, and it explicates the correlation between racial representations and how one feels history. My research has evolved to apply that correlation to how cultural traumas are narrated so that we may understand the psychical bondage to our regional or national past. For example, my article, “’Skeered to Holler,’” presents a new reading of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury as I use narratology and visual studies to analyze the gaps within the novel. I argue that the novel’s cubist images embed a sexual, interracial relationship between T.P. and Caddy Compson. Though Faulkner claims the novel signifies nothing, he germinates potent images of blackness. Upon realizing that Caddy gives birth to T.P.’s child, the social and psychological destructiveness of racism is apparent. Pointing to the hidden relationship also illuminates the on-going enigma surrounding Dilsey’s section of the novel. My article in progress, “Voodoo and African American Spiritual Resistance in the Plantation South,” connects Dilsey’s spectacle of redemption to her knowing the Compsons’ secret.

My research interests inform my teaching in that I believe that we should teach students how to read linguistic freeplay as challenges to hegemonic structures, both political and cultural. I believe that teaching students how to recognize the covert arguments about those hegemonic structures is pertinent to building strong families a healthy democracy. For example, my intertextual examination of Hurston's "Sweat" and Faulkner's "That Evening Sun" changed the way I taught "Sweat" in the classroom (see teaching experiments and assessments). Instead of focusing on Hurston's tone toward marriage, I shifted to the focus to domestic abuse. A student raised his hand and asked how to break the cycle of abuse. The experience taught me the connection between research and transformative teaching.

In short, my research interests focus on the structures, styles, forms, and language of texts, especially when the text pertains to cultural traumas, oppression, and representations of the “Other.” These interests also inform my teaching in that I bring my understanding of our southern culture into my classrooms to guide students through examining and analyzing textual representations of race, class, and gender. In so doing, students may recognize the nation’s (and the South’s) mental illness, and free themselves from it, even as they seek understanding and healing from the cultural scars historical traumas have left and the wounds our society continues to inflict through marginalization. For what good is an education if the students leave college ignorant about their humanity and the humanity of others?