Eric Darnell Pritchard joined our department in Fall of 2020 as a new Associate Professor of English. They specialize in intersections of race, queerness, sexuality, gender and class with historical and contemporary literacy, literary, and rhetorical practices, as well as fashion, beauty, and popular culture. This past January, we interviewed them about moving to Arkansas; taking over as the new Brown Chair in English Literacy; preparing to teach a range of courses for our Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Program; writing and publishing their first book and preparing to launch into their second; looking ahead to a post-Covid era; and other topics.
Had you spent much time in Arkansas before recently moving here from New York?
I had visited Arkansas previously on three occasions. The first time was when I was a graduate student and attended the 2007 Feminisms and Rhetorics conference in Little Rock, Arkansas. The other two times were for research on my first book, where I was interviewing Black LGBTQ+ people across the United States about their literacy lives. While there I got to enjoy some local restaurants, which were terrific, and also to visit the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum, which I found to be extraordinary in its architecture and exhibits.
What do you think about Fayetteville/Northwest Arkansas so far? Have you been able to see much of Arkansas due to COVID?
It has been difficult to get to know Fayetteville or Northwest Arkansas given the pandemic; I hope to be able to do more of that as things improve. I have gotten to see some of Fayetteville and Bentonville since I arrived. My first sight of northwest Arkansas on the day we arrived was the beautiful holiday lights in Bentonville City Square, and that beauty is also true of Fayetteville, which I also find to be serene and much warmer than upstate New York! I have enjoyed going on long walks along one of the local trails with my dogs. I have wanted to support local businesses as much as I can, so I have gotten takeout from some restaurants in Fayetteville and Bentonville, and my family and I agree that the food is really, really great here. That is not surprising, though—this is the South; folks know how to season well.
You will be taking over as the new Brown Chair in English Literacy at the U of A. How do you view the purpose of that role on campus and in the community/state?
I view the purpose of the Brown Chair as developing initiatives, programs, and partnerships that will grow and nurture literacy language and practice throughout Arkansas and across its boundaries. Essentially, then, the purpose of the Brown Chair is to be a beacon and exemplar for the import of community literacies work. As a community literacies scholar and teacher, I see community literacies as the single thread that is the basis of the structure bridging the Brown Chair as the center of a constellation connecting the university, and especially the College of Arts and Sciences and the English Department, to our neighbors, to the entire state, to the interdisciplinary field of Literacy Studies, and to our many partners in literacy activism, nationally and internationally.
What are some specific programs you hope to launch in that role?
My programs emerge from my research for an evolving project, which is a historical ethnography of community-accountable Black queer feminist literacies I examine through community educators and activist organizations from 1969-1990. Part of what I have learned from that research, and come to admire about those literacy activists, is the elegance of the simplicity in distilling community literacies work down to a set of ideas and ethics that are foundational to me as an ancestor-led and community-accountable Black queer feminist writer and teacher. For me, those ethics are love, justice, imagination, and community. With those principles as my foundation, I plan to marshal the various resources of the Brown Chair to focus on programs in four key areas: 1) research, 2) education, 3) advocacy, and 4) empowerment. There are several programs within each area. The main program, and the one I will prioritize, will be what I call the Arkansas Literacy Lab, a research hub where graduate students, faculty, and organizers interested in literacy research can propose and undertake a study about literacy in the state and have that study completed with the support of the Arkansas Literacy Lab. The lab will prioritize projects that have clear statewide, national, and international literacy and education policy implications and outcomes that can be used to impact schools, adult literacy programs, or other literacy-rich projects through partnerships with community literacy organizations in the state and nationally. The Arkansas Literacy Lab will also develop partnerships with the Latinx and Marshallese communities in Arkansas; support organizations that focus on the unearthing, documentation and sharing of Arkansas’s African American, LGBTQ+, and feminist histories; and create smaller programs that focus on literacy in applied trades and crafts such as sewing, gardening, farming, painting, and photography. I will, as I get to know Arkansas, and the great work people are already doing, be on the lookout for such partnerships, but I am very much hoping potential partners will reach out to me as well.
Another initiative, one that is more long-term, is to develop a Community Writing Center. I would like to have in various parts of the state both brick and mortar but also mobile community writing centers, as well, where the community writing center site could be an RV or other large vehicle that can travel all over the state and do pop-up events in conjunction with educators, nonprofit organizations, agriculture workers, and in various industries. I think this would be a really wonderful teaching opportunity for graduate students and a great training ground for undergraduate students who want to do community-accountable service by becoming a writing coach, but also a valuable opportunity for any faculty, staff, and administration colleagues who would want to make such community education a larger part of their teaching work too.
You’ll also be joining the English Department as a Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy faculty member. What are some courses you hope to design and teach for the department in the future?
At the graduate level, I plan to offer new courses on “Anti-Racist Writing Pedagogies,” “Community Literacies,” “Rhetoric and Popular Culture,” and “Black Feminist Rhetorics.” I have also, both in my past tenure-track positions and as a faculty member at the Bread Loaf School of English [part of Middlebury College], offered the courses “Queer Literacies and Pedagogies,” “Critical Hip Hop Studies,” and “Literacy Education and American Film.” I am also a scholar in Fashion Studies, and have twice offered a graduate seminar on “Fashion Rhetorics” that I would love to teach again. I also am a research methods geek—especially archival and ethnographic research methods—and I am excited to offer a research methods course, one I hope will draw interest from graduate students across the university.
At the undergraduate level I plan to offer courses such as “The Language of Black Freedom,” which is a class on Black expressive culture, “Queer of Color Film,” and “The Politics of Fashion and Beauty.”
Your first book, Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy, was published in 2016. Can you summarize its focus and explain what drew you to the topic?
Fashioning Lives analyzes the life stories of 60 Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people along with archival documents, literature, and film, to provide a theoretical framework for studying the literacy work of Black LGBTQ+ people who are marginalized by traditional categories imposed on their language practices and identities. In the book I look at the, sadly, many ways literacy is used to inflict harm, what I conceptualize as “literacy terror,” how harmful events prompt Black LGBTQ+ people to ensure their own survival by repurposing literacy through literacy performances fueled by accountability to self and communal love towards social and political change, a process I describe as “restorative literacies.” The book looks at restorative literacies in a variety of literacy institutions (e.g., libraries, schools), historical records repositories, religious and spiritual spaces, parties, community events, activist organizations, and digital spheres. It was the first book-length study to draw connections between race and queerness in literacy, composition, and rhetoric. What drew me to the topic was, actually, an assignment I received in a research-methods class my first year as a doctoral student. The assignment was to find a place where you wanted to explore literacy practices. My housemate was having a weekly watching party of the television show Project Runway, and because I worked evenings at the writing center and had so much work to do, I could never go to this fun gathering that was at my own home. Well, that assignment gave me an excuse to check it out and, what I wanted to look at was how people were talking about fashion and reality television. However, what was unique was that everyone at the watch party was a Black queer man, and I quickly noticed the ways that the literacies and language practices in that space were so rich, dynamic, and exciting, which is something I always knew being a Black queer person myself, but it was the assignment that invited me to a moment of pause to think about all the various possibilities for doing work centered on Black queer life, history, and culture. That led me to write my dissertation, where I completed the first half of the interviews that became the data on which I later continued to research and write Fashioning Lives and to dedicate my scholarship to documenting, preserving, sharing, and celebrating Black queer life, culture, and history.
Another book project you are currently working on is Abundant Black Joy: The Life and Work of Patrick Kelly, which will be published by Amistad/HarperCollins in 2023. Could you talk a little about why you chose Kelly’s life and career as your next focus?
I have been fascinated by Patrick Kelly since I first saw him on television when I was about 9-years-old. He was a Black queer man, born and raised in the small, segregated city of Vicksburg, Mississippi, who grew up to establish one of the hottest fashion labels in Paris. His clothes were worn by a who’s who of the world’s most glamorous women, including “The Dianas” (that is, Diana Ross and Diana, Princess of Wales), film legends Cicely Tyson and Bette Davis, and pop stars Grace Jones and Madonna. He created an original and controversial visual vocabulary that blended the painful histories of American racial terror and the aesthetics of the South’s Black poor and working classes, with the joy and glamour of Black pop icons. I first saw Kelly when I was a child on a show called Style with Elsa Klensch that used to air on CNN, and in the segment they talked about how Kelly, who was born and raised in Vicksburg, Mississippi, had made history by becoming the first American ever welcomed into the decades-old Chambre Syndicale du Prêt-à-Porter des Couturiers et des Créateurs de Mode. The prestigious and more-than-a-century-old Chambre Syndicale, akin to the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA), governs the French fashion industry and membership is considered by many to be the pinnacle of success in the world of high fashion. In my childhood thought, I had known fashionable Black people, but I had never seen a Black person who was in charge of their own fashion label, let alone someone who looked so different than anyone else I had seen represented in fashion on television prior—this man with a Southern accent wearing oversize denim bib overalls, a t-shirt, Converse sneakers, and a cyclist’s cap with “Paris,” written across the top. As I grew into adolescence, then began to intern in the fashion industry in New York City, became a journalist, and ultimately went to graduate school, I would periodically look to learn more about him and was shocked to discover that there had been no biography about his life and work. Given that my purpose, again, is to document, preserve, share, and celebrate Black queer life, culture, and history, I felt it was imperative that I pursue my interest in Kelly and write the definitive biography of this trailblazing figure.
What are you most looking forward to in 2021 (hopefully, post-COVID)?
I have five nieces and nephews, and they are my absolute joy and happiness, but I have not been able to see them in person since last March [of 2020] because of the pandemic. I am so excited for them to visit Fayetteville. It will be nice to get to see the state through their eyes, and I have begun to make a list of fun things we can do when they visit. I also love movies and it would not be an exaggeration to say I would go to the movie theater about once a week. I cannot wait to just go see a movie again, load up on all my favorite snacks at the concession stand, and experience a film the way, I think, films ought to be experienced.
What is a favorite pedagogical exercise you use in class, and why?
I sometimes have students, graduate and undergraduate, create a “Zine” to introduce themselves and their research interests to the class. The Zine can be a physical copy or digital. I find that it helps for people to have a wide range of creative materials and resources at their disposal in order to tell us who they are and what matters to them. I also, as a teacher, really love when a course begins from a place of creativity and imagination being invoked and respected as a source of knowledge making and dissemination. I find that it keeps people open to employing that same creativity and imagination to think through the many complex theories, concepts, problems we will discuss, and to stand firmly in a place of possibility in all of their contributions to the course whether written or verbal.
What is one of the best books you’ve read in the past year, and why?
Last year I started a virtual “Fashion and Visual Culture Book Club” just to stay connected to people and engaged while sheltering in place during the pandemic. One of the books we read was Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration by Nicole R. Fleetwood. The book is about how people who are imprisoned take ordinary objects available to them or other found objects, and turn them into works of art that asserts their humanity and personhood in a system that is violent and dehumanizing to them. That the art they make goes far beyond the boundaries of prison is also an important testament to the work that artists who are imprisoned make. The book is meticulously researched, challenging, and written with so much love, care, and honesty. It is a book that transformed me. I will never look at art the same way again, whether it is created by people who are or are not in prisons. And I will never look at museums the same way again; I learned so much about the history of museums and surprising relationships to carcerality. As a fashion scholar, I also like that she incorporated attention to dress and adornment as part of artmaking. It’s just a really fantastic book. I highly recommend it in general, but especially to anyone interested in visual culture, abolition and the dismantling of the prison industrial complex, and the relationship between art and activism.
Any movies/miniseries you would also recommend, and why?
Films:
Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado (Netflix): The film is about the internationally known Puerto Rican astrologer, Walter Mercado, who disappeared at the height of his fame and tells the story of why. It is such a heartfelt, loving, sincere portrait of a one-of-a-kind individual, and touches on gender identity and expression, celebrity, fashion, and other always timely topics.
The Forty-Year-Old Version (Netflix): Written and directed by Radha Blank, this film is a dramatic comedy about a Black woman who became a superstar playwright in her 20s, but whose star waned over more than a decade. As she is close to turning 40 she decides to become a rapper. It is a satirical take on the theater industry, on New York City, and on the experiences of Black women creatives, and invites viewers to think meaningfully about race, gender, sexuality, aging, and the hardship and promise of making art.
Sylvie’s Love (Amazon Video): A love story about a Black couple in the mid-20th century, with the most beautiful soundtrack of jazz music and American standards I have ever heard. The title character, Sylvie, is pursuing a career as a television producer while also navigating some of the conventions of what is expected of her as a Black woman just because she is creating herself and choosing that as she confronts one choice at a time. It was just a pleasure to watch a film centered on Black Love, period.
To conclude, who has been the most inspirational or effective teacher/professor in your life, and why?
I have been blessed to have been the student of so many inspirational teachers. If I must choose one, I would say Nellie Y. McKay. Professor McKay was a trailblazer in African-American Literature and Culture, who worked for decades at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Afro-American Studies and Department of English. I took classes with her and she also directed my M.A. thesis on James Baldwin, Randall Kenan, and the Black Gay Men’s Literary Tradition. Unfortunately, she passed away before I defended by dissertation. She was inspirational to me because she was a truly community-accountable scholar. She was so committed to the work of Black women’s writing and Black Feminist literary criticism, at a time when that work was burgeoning among Black women, but still marginalized in the academy and in the publishing world. As a graduate student it was early on clear to me that her courageousness, and the courageousness of the Black women scholars of her generation, really created space for me to feel that I too must be courageous in my scholarly pursuits even if that means pursuing fields where no reward is promised. You do the work because these are parts of history, culture, life, and politics that must be told. She also did a lot of institutional work to not only recruit, but to retain Black graduate students and Black junior-faculty, creating a community where we felt we could flourish in an academy that did not anticipate us and, in some instances, was not always hospitable to or affirming of our full presence. A biography about her life, Half In Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Nellie Y. McKay, written by one of her other graduate students, Dr. Shanna Greene Benjamin, was released in April 2021 from the University of North Carolina Press.
