Dr. Harrison Graves: Exploring Black Masculinity, Tradition, and Gender Roles in African American Literature
One of our department's newer professors is Dr. William Harrison Graves. Hailing from the great city of Philadelphia, Dr. Graves holds a PhD in English Literature, as well as certifications in Critical Theory and African American Studies. His research centered around 20th and 21st century African American Lit. "I specifically study discourses on black masculinity post 1965, after the Moynihan Report, a famous report titled 'The Negro Family, the Case for National Action', which states that the impediment to black people's progress in the US is the lack of the family unit; it pathologizes the family unit by saying that black people don't live up to proper gender roles as it relates to post enslavement. I'm looking at how African American writers and filmmakers are responding to this anxiety around gender roles and how they specifically respond, not necessarily to the report itself, but to the larger cultural imagination."
Dr. Harrison's educational journey was one built on community and strong mentorship. "I went to undergrad at the University of Maryland College Park, in the DC, Maryland, Virginia area; Maryland was a hub of African American literature, and Maryland was so close to Howard University and Georgetown American University, where I was able to get a really interesting, diasporic experience."
Surrounding Dr. Graves was host of prominent professors, specifically in the Maryland DC Metro area which was bringing a lot of new talent. "There was a famous scholar by the name of Mary Helen Washington, who has done a lot of work on black women in literature. She was focusing on black people in relationship to leftist politics in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, in the McCarthy era. Then, I went to the University of Delaware for my master's, where I studied with Dr. Gabrielle Forman, who did a lot of 19th century work around the color conventions movement, which was a big movement that Frederick Douglass and other prominent figures were a part of, who were engaging in political conversation around free black communities, but also related to enslaved communities, and how to navigate these sort of political landmines. It was interesting, to learn all these different conversations of the 19th century that were pre-dating the 20th century, but had so much overlap. This then brought me to Northwestern which has a strong African American Studies program, there I learned a lot of the theoretical and some philosophical underpinnings of those ideologies"
As a professor of the English Department, Dr. Graves aims for his students is to understand the feeling that African American writers had when creating their work. "One of the things I try to give my students is understanding the strain of feeling through art that has driven this tradition, or how we have weaved this tradition together. I want them to understand the arc of the story as opposed to them just knowing random facts about specific authors, so that they know where we've been and where we're going, or where we are currently, especially as things are just repeating themselves."
For the work in his classes Dr. Graves doesn't only seek texts, he is a deep believer of introducing other forms of media to help his students really grasp the history and feeling of a particular subject. "I'm definitely a big fan of film, documentary or fiction films. I'll bring instructional videos too; if I'm trying to teach in a nutshell, the Transatlantic slavery, I might bring a PBS or TED Talk or a History Channel documentary that distills ideas and offers sound bites for students to absorb. I love bringing in art. If I teach Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, I bring in a lot of artists, paintings and things like that, that were inspired by the text. So, trying to apply what Ellison might be trying to convey in his text, and then I have them apply it to what are they're looking at artistically. I also bring in music too. To help understand the undercurrents of African American literature and the tradition and the vernacular culture, I play the sorrow songs for students, or I'll play jazz and blues, and then I talk about the ways that those things morphed into other genres that are influencing the rhythm in the sound of that time. In the Black Arts Movement there's a lot of conversations, there's jazz and blues, but also there's soul and disco merging, and all these different genres that help you understand the feeling of the text too."
"A big learning goal for me in my classes is understanding different movements of literature, how we move from the slave narrative to reconstruction literature, and then experimentation in the Harlem Renaissance to experimentation and realism, modernism. I want students to know that black literature specifically is always a sort of experimentation as it responds to the circumstances of what it means to be racialized in this country. I talk about that by creating conversation around the relationship between politics and art, and that pressure that a lot of black writers and artists had in trying to figure out what does my art have to do? What's its purpose? Does art need a purpose?"