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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y R E V I E W
Fall 2023
Teaching Local: Interdisciplinary Archival Methods for Community-Based Learning in Wilmington, NC On a Tuesday morning in August, on the campus of the University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW), seven phenotypically by white students arrive, with some trepidation, to the first day of a class entitled “Resilience Over Racism: An Interdisciplinary ExAllison Harris, ploration of Inequality in Wilmington.” Their hesitation stems in Sarah Gaby, part from coming to the course from majors like biology, chemistry, and environmental science with little experience studying race and Kimi Faxon Hemingway, racism. When asked, the students acknowledge that they don’t know Ann Rotchford, much about the lived experience of Black members of their comand munities, either in Wilmington or their hometowns. While they have some educational experiences discussing the nation’s “original Elizabeth Wellman sin” of enslavement, few students have any sense of what Wilmington’s enslaved population endured or the subsequent experiences of horrific racial violence that followed Emancipation. Over the next fifteen weeks, they will use interdisciplinary methods to examine both quantitative data and Over the next fifteen weeks, they will use literary narratives to try to unpack the legacies of interdisciplinary methods to examine both racial violence in Wilmington and to understand quantitative data and literary narratives to how Black resilience over inequality and oppression has produced a vibrant community central to try to unpack the legacies of racial violence Wilmington’s success. in Wilmington and to understand how Black Understanding the past and present violence resilience over inequality and oppression experienced by the Black community in the Cape has produced a vibrant community central Fear region is a more daunting task than in other to Wilmington’s success. places because of both historical erasure and the continued dominance of white data, perspectives, and interpretations. In “Teaching Hometown Literature: A Pedagogy of Place,” James Cahalan argues that reframing literature courses to center place, particularly the places that students identify as significant to them, encourages better contextual understanding for students.1 In this article, we make a similar argument, but with a significant caveat: What if the stories of a community have been actively erased, purged, ignored, or otherwise kept out of the literary canon? What if the stories that are told about a Black community come primarily from white outsiders? To address this
1
James M. Cahalan, “Teaching Hometown Literature: A Pedagogy of Place.” College English 70.3 (2008): 249–74.