Coloring the Past, Considerations on Our Future: RaceB4Race

Abstract:This essay is not one i thought to write when asked to contribute to this issue. My expectation was that I would submit a simple revision of "Coloring the Past, Rewriting Our Future: RaceB4Race" (the keynote lecture from which this paper emerges), only along scholarly lines. Yet, as history has long proven, what people intend and what they actually produce may be very different. I now find myself in a different writing space and less wedded to academic rhetoric. This essay, then, is a thought piece, a forward-facing reflection on the public humanities. It is also autobiographical in certain respects, since I am an academic who once struggled to find a place within the academy but no longer do. Thus, this meditation/mediation has two parts. Part One is retrospective: a look back at my place in an effort to decolonize my professional relationship to the academy and the discipline where my intellectual efforts are housed, the field of early modern English literature and culture (where I once landed not fully by choice). Part Two is a letter to and for Black, Indigenous, Peoples of Color (BIPOC) colleagues and allies.