History, Memory, Forgetting, and Social Justice

JASON YOUNG

2020-21 RICHARD AND LILLIAN IVES FACULTY FELLOW interview

history, memory, forgetting, and social justice

This interview was part of “What I’m Reading This Week,” a series of fellows interviews conducted by 2020-21 marketing and media intern Nathaniel Liebetreau. See p. 24 for our interview with Nathaniel.

Jason Young is a 2020-21 Richard and Lillian Ives Faculty Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities. He is the author of Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry Region of Georgia and South Carolina in the Era of Slavery. He is also the co-editor, with Edward J. Blum, of The Souls of W.E.B. Du Bois: New Essays and Reflections. This collection addresses the much neglected soulful side of the man whose most famous work was about the souls of black folk. Young has published articles in The Journal of African American History, The Journal of Africana Religions, and The Journal of Southern Religion, among others. He is currently conducting research toward his next book project, “To Make the Slave Anew”: Art, History and the Politics of Authenticity. N.L.: HELLO JASON, THANK YOU FOR DOING THIS INTERVIEW. TO START US OFF, WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN READING RECENTLY? AND HOW IS THIS RELEVANT TO YOUR PROJECT IF IT’S PROJECT RELATED? J.Y.: Thanks so much for reaching out to me on this. I have been reading two books recently, one that is informing my approach to teaching and another that is related to my research.

In light of the changed and changing landscape of teaching, I have been reading Mary Cappello’s book Lecture, which reads both as a defense of the traditional academic lecture as well as an urgent call for change. Although the book was written before the pandemic, it was released shortly after COVID-19 necessitated a major overhaul in how we think about pedagogy. In this way, the book feels eerily timely and prescient.

My time at the humanities Institute will be devoted to completing my book manuscript To Make the Slave Anew, a study of the varied and often controversial ways that powerful myth makers in the South memorialized the slave past some fifty years after the end of the Civil War. I have recently been drawn to Reiko Hillyer’s Designing Dixie, a fascinating study of how city

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