Amherst Reads Transcript

Amira Lundy-Harris: OK. Great. So my name is Amir Lundy Harris, class of 2016. I’m a PhD student in women studies at the University of Maryland. I study black trans family formations. Today I have the pleasure of getting to interview Professor Aneeka Henderson about her new book.

So Anika Ayanna Henderson is an assistant professor of sexuality, women’s and gender studies at Amherst. Her research and teaching interests are in sexuality, women’s and gender studies, African American studies and cultural studies. Her new book Veil & Vow: Marriage Matters in Contemporary African American Culture was just published this month by the University of North Carolina Press.

So Professor Henderson, let’s go ahead and just jump right into the book. So I want to start by talking about a couple of the early reviews of the book that you recently got.

Professor Tera Hunter at Princeton University says “This is fascinating reading. Veil and Vow perfectly captures how fairy-tale aspirations of wedlock intersect with the supposed bootstrap mobility of the ‘American Dream,’ undergirding angst about the marriage market in crisis.”

Duke University’s Professor Mark Anthony Neil says, “Aneeka Henderson’s brilliant Veil and Vow recalls the historical and contemporary challenges that matrimony has posed for Black women--often on the fringes of full citizenship and safety--and their ingenuity in claiming an equality that works for them.”

Professor Robert J. Patterson at Georgetown University explains that quote "Veil and Vow models interdisciplinary scholarship at its finest.”

 And finally, Cornel University’s Professor Noliwe Rooks quote “The denial of Black humanity has long been bound up with questions about Black people’s ability to love. Veil and Vow affirms the cultural consistency of Black love and marriage. There is simply no other book on the subject that has the interdisciplinary and popular culture reach of this one. Aneeka Henderson refutes, enlightens and provokes. Read her book!”

So these reviews give sort of a wonderful sense of your book from the perspective of some of the sort of most prominent scholars working within the fields that you move across right including history, cultural studies, African American studies, English literature, so from your vantage point can you talk to us, the Amherst Reads listeners, a little bit about your book, and important themes that you want readers to consider.

Aneeka Henderson: Yes! So first I want to thank you for taking the time to do this interview Amir. I know that graduate study and working and graduate school takes a lot of time so I appreciate you taking the time to do this.

ALH: My pleasure.

AH: Yeah! So Veil and Vow like you said is published by UNC Press and the Gender and American Culture series and I am particularly proud to have those early reviews because they really reflect my engagement and kind of intellectual commitment to historical analysis, African American studies, cultural and gender studies and literary studies. So Veil and Vow argued that portraits of courtship and marriage and the popular and political imaginary are an indispensable mode of reassessing family formations. So rather than rehearse the kind of sweeping generalizations and political and cultural discourse kind of pronouncing marriage as wholly good or bad, I’m shifting my focus to highlighting and uncovering kind of nuance in portraits of courtship and marriage and fiction, film and music. So my analysis and archive begins in 1989 with Terry McMillan’s novel Disappearing Acts. And then it ends in the year 2000 with Gina Prince-Bythewood’s film Love and Basketball, but I begin Veil and Vow by historicizing the ways in which representations of matrimony have been used as an entry point for theorizing racialized gender subjectivity, 4:57 and political autonomy. Then I move to kind of critically examining political playing and legislation such as the criminalization of same sex marriage and the 1996 Defensive Marriage Act alongside contemporary narrative and creative work and I do that in order to expose the fiction and kind of fairy tale and political policies and the political stakes of these fictional texts. So the text that I explore which I situate within this larger African American cultural cannon are kind of important, influential, often… many of them are kind of bestsellers but they’re often deemed simplistic and contrived. So by reading against the grain and archive it, kind of register this supposedly apolitical and unimportant, I’m offering an intervention that works towards dismantling characterizations of black romantic desire as frivolous and superficial.

ALH: Great! Great! Thank you. So, after taking some of your, all of your classes, Women’s and Gender Equality Culture and black women’s literary traditions, black women’s narrative, mad black women, when I was at Amherst and also after getting a chance to read Veil and Vow, I have I feel a pretty good sense of why it’s important for us to be thinking about these issues and texts right, or rethinking these texts. But I wonder if you could maybe talk a little bit about why it’s important for Amherst Reads listeners.

AH: Yeah! Yes. It was … it was wonderful to have you in those classes because you were building like complex connections and threads like throughout and across those courses and reading assignments you had a kind of deep, critical engagement with the text especially by the time you were a senior, which was fantastic. And I think one as a testament to your skills and talents and gifts and also Amherst College’s open curriculum which is I think an incredible resource for students and faculty right. So it would have been much more difficult for you to kind of follow this line of inquiry if we did not have the kind of open curriculum. It is important for the Amherst Reads audience to be thinking about assumptions undergirding popular culture as a supposed apolitical cultural domain quite completely separate from the ostensibly kind of serious landscape of political commentary, activism and change. So Veil and Vow come to explore the complicated relationship between them but argue that this intimacy between political and popular culture unmasks the discrepancy between the vows that political leaders ask of their constituents and the vows they pledge to those they consider legitimate citizens. And this coupling also reveals the kind of passive and conspicuous political pressures that function as unruly, antagonist and shape the kind of process and depiction of courtship in these texts. So by drawing these connections, Veil and Vow is illuminating, the kind of same binding the ways in which political and popular texts these fashion the notion of family. At the same time I want readers to resist envisioning the popular culture as very similar or purely realistic text that is incapable of offering  its audience, the readers new ways to think about and reconsider art, imaginary world, creative production and the kind of relationship between a novel or film for example to a larger African American cultural cannon. So, in the book, I explore the complex ways that political and popular culture intervene and enriches our conversation about African American family formations. And these issues are important because you know, though the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act was more than 20 years ago our current political and social climate remains fraught. So Veil and Vows attention to the ways in which African American communities have long wrestled with the meaning and significance of intimacy, courtship and marriage as well as these kind of ubiquitous political phrases such as family values can help readers better understand the kind of progress and challenges we face in our current moment. So I discuss how African American people have long been ingenious in the way that they have stitched together various forms of kinship and family despite systemic obstacles but are still grappling with some of the same language battle and assumptions about marriage and family formation.

ALH: Great! Thank you for that. So, you can sort of see a lot of the literary analysis that your English literary background comes through and this is the foundation of Veil and Vow. But we also sort of see the life of the books that you analyze right, the culture that helps shapes the books and also the way the books help shape the culture, right. So for instance, right, each chapter marries a song to a theme and thus a set of books. You also talk about, or you also sort of take an interesting approach to the structure of the book, opening with the invocation and closing with a benediction and beginning each chapter with an epigraph from wedding vows right. So when I was reading the structure, the structure sort of made me think of the project with the book as in its own way as ceremony. Has that...is that sort of how you imagined it and can you talk a little bit about what the writing process was for Veil and Vow?

AH: Yes. I think that it’s such a fantastic close reading of Vow. I did imagine it as a ceremony, I  just, I really like that reading and the vows are connected to obviously the title of the book as well and its theoretical focus, so in the invocation or introduction I use W.E.B. du Bois’s contention “that within and without the somber veil of color vast social forces have been at work”, which comes from his 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk. So I cite him and his theory about the veil in my project to kind of capture how social barriers, rather than racial pathologies can hinder the path to marriage. And so earlier I was talking about how those vows get articulated through politicians and with their asking of constituents and what they considered to be legitimate citizens. And so that’s a really great question too about the writing process because it makes me think about how Veil and Vow has its own kind of origin story and so the very early stages of writing a book, I had a very different idea and image of what Veil and Vow would look like. In fact, it had a different title, it had two different titles before Veil and Vow. Except I really wanted to get the title right. So as I critically examined, you know, buried text and dug through archival material, I shifted my analytical trajectory to thinking about cultural production that went beyond merely analyzing the words and images in a novel or film so you see that I explore book covers, art by Jacob Lawrence, publicity materials for films, memes, phonic text in other kinds of cultural 15:05  and so the book also includes 16 color plates so that readers can follow along with my analysis which was important for me.

ALH: That was…yeah. That was one of the things that I really noticed when I was reading how that sort of helped the process of the reading. So my final question has to do with the sort of relationship between your research and pedagogy. As I was reading Veil and Vow I found that I was familiar with a number of the scholars that were cited and the themes that were addressed in the chapters through the classes that I took with you during my time at Amherst so how do you feel that teaching has, if at all, shaped or helped the process of writing the book?

AH: Yeah. So teaching has absolutely played an important part in writing this book but in varying ways. So let me take you a little bit on the journey, so I began Veil…

ALH: Please.

AH: So I began Veil and Vow, so actually I began Veil and Vow the beginning like the invocation with this kind of tableau or scene of women on the train in Chicago during the 1990 by reading some of the novels that I explore. I don’t know so for some of my Chicago listeners I will say, I will specify that I was getting off the train at Racine and I was going to Whitney Young High School of which Ms. Michelle Obama is a proud alum, alright so one reason that I was fascinated by the scene on the train was because of the fashion and the sartorial kind of  ingenuities that these women had and made taking a dreary 7 a.m. train much more exciting and Michelle Obama is kind of a 17:18 trend setter so for me as I was watching this scene take place every morning, the fashions were mirroring the vibrant book cover which I talk about in Veil and Vow. And it was also teaching me something about what to read and black women’s intervention in visual culture and how they were navigating the world and I think this lesson was important so I was witnessing their migration from like their suburban and urban home to careers in the city and also, I was also witnessing another kind of migration in which black popular fiction authors are reclaiming…were reclaiming an extraordinary faith in African American culture. So I have a kind of long history with many of these texts that I focus on because I was also reading these novels at the time I saw the women on the train reading them, I was often prompted by what they were reading. And so they were giving me a kind of syllabus really. So in thinking about teaching I think about that as a kind of formative moment and so I began doing more formal research on the books and films as a graduate student. And so by the time I came to Amherst College I had spent an enormous amount of time with these texts. But it can be difficult to write and do research while teaching which you will find out. Oh you know. You know. You know

ALH: Yes.

AH: So being in the classroom and keeping these novels and films actually helps me kind of stay close to them and close to my research and one of the wonderful things again about Amherst College is that faculty has the opportunity to design their own classes and that’s not true for every institution. And so I was able to be creative and innovative with my pedagogy which I really appreciate. And I also, actually want to emphasize other things that helped me write this book. So writing a monograph requires multiple forms of support. You cannot do this type of endeavor alone. So having like the support of family, friends and colleagues along with institutional support such as the American Association of University Women fellowship and Mellon Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement fellowship was critical to completing this project. So, yeah, and I guess since that’s the final question I would love to kind of just take this moment at the end to turn things around a bit if I can and end the interview with a question for you. So you have taken several classes with me being a first year student all the way to your senior year and you read and finished Veil and Vow which I think is impressive. So I wonder if you could talk about what felt familiar for you and what the surprises were for you as you read the book.

ALH: Yeah sure. I think after you know taking all of your classes a lot of the materials of the book felt familiar right in terms of having read some of the books across classes right push a number of the books by Terry McMillan. Thinking about also some of the theorists used to recite you know to think about those books as well, and then also sort of learning about some of the political contexts that shapes this cultural moment and I guess the cultural moment that is shaping that political context as well right. So in terms of learning about the ’96 Defense of Marriage Act, the Welfare Reform Act, right and to thinking about those in terms of the context of marriage right. And so some of that felt familiar to me after having sort of taken you know theme classes with you but what was I feel like I won’t say surprising but sort of new and certainly exciting for me I think was getting to see how you sort of brought all of that together into this sort of powerful argument right, about the significance of a cultural representation of marriage in the black family. And to getting to see like all of this sort of pieces that you know I had  already read coming together into this one large project was, it was very…really interesting for me and exciting and I mean I just, I love the book so …

AH: Oh that so…you’re so kind.

ALH: Yeah, no it was really interesting and I think definitely important in sort of taking some of these conversations that are happening across African American studies, Women and Gender studies, Cultural studies and sort of continuing the conversation moving it in a new direction. So yeah.

AH: Yeah. Yeah. Wow! Thank you so much Amir.

ALH: Thank you!