Left of Black #31 w/ Karla FC Holloway April 25, 2011
Left of Black host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal is joined by fellow Duke University Professor Karla FC Holloway, author the new book Private Bodies, Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics (Duke University Press). Neal and Holloway discuss medical racism, the Tuskegee experiments and the new biography of Malcolm X.
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→Karla FC Holloway is James B. Duke Professor of English at Duke University. She also holds appointments in the Law School, Women’s Studies and African & African American Studies. Her research and teaching interests focus on African American cultural studies, bicultural studies, gender, ethics and law. Professor Holloway is the author of eight books, including Passed On: African-American Mourning Stories (2002), BookMarks—Reading in Black and White, A Memoir (2006) and the recent Private Bodies, Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics.
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Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.
Panelists at the Atelier@Duke symposium discuss "Private Bodies," the fourth of five panels at the Atelier@Duke, an event marking the 15th anniversary of the John Hope Franklin Research Center at Duke University Libraries.
Panelists include Harriet Washington (Author, Medical Apartheid), Charmaine Royal (Duke), Alondra Nelson (Columbia), Anne Lyerly (UNC-CH), and moderator Karla Holloway (Duke).
Join Mark Anthony Neal for a live taping of Left of Black on Wednesday April 13, 2011 featuring Karla FC Holloway, James B. Duke Professor of English and Professor of Law at Duke University and the author of the new book Private Bodies/Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics (Duke University Press, 2011). The special taping is being held in conjunction with the regular Wednesdays @ the Center programming at the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University. The Gothic Bookshop will have copies of Private Bodies/Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics for sale.
Wednesday @ The Center Left of Black with Mark Anthony Neal and Karla FC Holloway Wednesday, April 13, 2011 12:00 Noon
The John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary & International Studies 2204 Erwin Road Durham, NC 27708-0402 Room 240
Private Bodies, Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics by Karla FC Holloway Duke University Press 248 Pages
Description
In Private Bodies, Public Texts, Karla FC Holloway examines instances where medical issues and information that would usually be seen as intimate, private matters are forced into the public sphere. As she demonstrates, the resulting social dramas often play out on the bodies of women and African Americans. Holloway discusses the spectacle of the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case and the injustice of medical researchers’ use of Henrietta Lacks’s cell line without her or her family’s knowledge or permission. She offers a provocative reading of the Tuskegee syphilis study and a haunting account of the ethical dilemmas that confronted physicians, patients, and families when a hospital became a space for dying rather than healing during Hurricane Katrina; even at that dire moment, race mattered. Private Bodies, Public Texts is a compelling call for a cultural bioethics that attends to the historical and social factors that render some populations more vulnerable than others in medical and legal contexts. Holloway proposes literature as a conceptual anchor for discussions of race, gender, bioethics, and the right to privacy. Literary narratives can accommodate thick description, multiple subjectivities, contradiction, and complexity.
Table of Contents
Preface xv Acknowledgements xxi Introduction. The Law of the Body 1 1. Bloodchild 25 2. Cartographies of Desire 67 3. Who's Got the Body? 101 4. Immortality in Cultures 137 Notes 173 Bibliography 199 Index 211
Endorsements
“Private Bodies/Public Texts is as powerful as it is beautifully written. Karla FC Holloway’s is a very different kind of bioethics, one that challenges us to think both more broadly and more specifically about what privacy and justice mean. And she reminds us, with sometimes piercing insight, just how critical gender and race can be in making meaning out of both.” —Ruth R. Faden, Director, Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics
“Private Bodies/Public Texts is an illuminating meditation on the social construction of personal identity, with special focus on gender and racial categorizations in biomedical ethics. Drawing on diverse sources from medicine, law and literature, Karla FC Holloway shows how devalued gender and racial identities not only set the stage for past biomedical abuses but are ironically replicated in the paradigmatic examples that contemporary bioethics invokes in the supposed service of correcting those abuses. This is a subtle, challenging book.” —Robert A. Burt, Alexander M. Bickel Professor of Law, Yale University
“Karla FC Holloway has written an important book that challenges the objectification of patients’ stories that is so common in the practice of bioethics. She persuasively argues for a cultural ethics, an ethics which gives constitutive weight to the cultural context of those stories, especially the cultural contexts of race and gender identity. Using this approach, she presents crucial new insights into issues of reproduction, clinical trials, genomics and death and dying. Her discussion of the events at Memorial Medical Center after Katrina will become a classic in the field. But most importantly, she shows us that the practice of bioethics must change if it is to successfully relate to the issues raised by the thick narratives of reality.” —Baruch A. Brody, Baylor College of Medicine
About The Author
Karla FC Holloway is James B. Duke Professor of English at Duke University, where she also holds appointments in the Law School, Women’s Studies, and African & African American Studies, and is an affiliated faculty with the Institute on Care at the End of Life and the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities & History of Medicine. She serves on the Greenwall Foundation’s Advisory Board in Bioethics, was recently elected to the Hastings Center Fellows Association, and is the author of many books, including Bookmarks: Reading in Black and White; Passed On: African-American Mourning Stories, also published by Duke University Press; and Codes of Conduct: Race, Ethics, and the Color of Our Character.
Director Steven Spielberg took one look at Anson County, North Carolina and decided it was the perfect setting for the film adaptation of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Color Purple.” That was in 1985. Twenty-five years later, the little purple flowers that were planted by Spielberg’s production team still bloom in Anson County and the film that catapulted the careers of lead actresses Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey remains significant for its beautiful cinematography, powerful performances and controversial depictions of African-American life.
To commemorate the 25th anniversary of the film, “The Color Purple,” host Frank Stasio talks to a panel of guests about the movie’s production, its connection to Walker’s written narrative, and how it challenges audiences with complex themes of race, family, gender and sexuality. Joining the conversation is Lu Ellen Huntley, an associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and a member of the family that owned the Anson County farm where the movie was filmed; Michael Connor, theater coordinator at Livingstone College who appears in the film; Charlene Regester, associate professor of African and Afro-American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of “African American Actresses: The Struggle for Visibility, 1900-1960”; L. Lamar Wilson, an English PhD student and Composition Teaching Fellow at UNC-Chapel Hill; and Karla FC Holloway, James B. Duke Professor of English and a professor of law at Duke University.
The phrase is not mine. University of California, Berkeley, literature professor Judith Butler explains the precariousness of life – its ontological vulnerability. Some lives are known well enough and valued highly enough to be grievable. And others are only accidentally noticeable. These differential values are familiar terrain to cultural studies and bioethics scholars where the idea of excess mortality – deaths that exceed the predictive statistics for certain populations – are as familiar as a funeral refrain, “soon one morning death will come a calling.”
For 7-year-old Aiyana Stephens-Jones of Detroit, it was an evening death call when the launch of a flash grenade burned her delicate body just before a policeman’s fatal bullet entered her neck. The circumstances were violent and fleetingly public. A television crew was filming this police raid, as they had been filming others, for “public” programming. Some bodies are more public than others. It is a bit more difficult to imagine that film crew following a police raid into Bloomfield Hills rather than into urban Detroit.
The circumstances of this child’s death are, not surprisingly, under dispute. Was the gunshot intentional, accidental, or careless? Ironically, it will be helpful to the resolution of this question that a film crew was onsite. It does not, however, mitigate against the public invasion of private lives that vulnerable bodies – citizens who are poor or who are minorities or who are children – experience.
It does not change the familiar procession before the open casket of a child, where other little girls and boys will peer into its recesses and see a body that looks like their own and perhaps even marvel at the pretty pink dress she wore, the carefully placed rosary, and the spray of flowers and loving notes and prayers that surrounded her tiny body. It may be one of the loveliest if not most tragic images of their young lives. It may well be the one they romanticize and recall and even imagine for themselves instead of a prom or wedding dress, or a graduation gown or a carefully chosen tuxedo with matching vest and tie.
They will look down at Aiyana and wonder if they will be as pretty and as loved as she was on this day of her obsequies. They will not remember her life. This was not the value displayed at the moment and circumstances, and that made her vulnerable to a killing. Instead, they will recall her funeralizing and imagine the words spoken about them will be as passionate and emotive as those pronounced over the stilled body of this child, whose pitiful death brought her to our notice, albeit briefly.
For decades, John Hope Franklin railed against the often segregated academic field of 'black studies,' deriding it as intellectual Jim Crow. But there would be no black studies without him, and for that, I am eternally grateful.
I did my doctoral work at Duke University and had the the opportunity to encounter Professor Franklin many times during my graduate training. Each time it was a privilege because John Hope Franklin was a superstar intellectual who managed to be utterly open and personally humble with students. He made us feel like partners, rather than subordinates, in academic inquiry.
In an age when black public intellectuals are rewarded for pop-culture peppered verbal dexterity and aggressive self-promotion; Dr. Franklin maintained a mode of inquiry which exposed injustice and dismantled inadequate arguments with soft-spoken dignity. His gentle manner sometimes led interlocutors to underestimate him, but it was not a mistake made more than once, because Franklin's razor sharp intellect and quick wit were memorable.
John Hope Franklin had deep personal and professional knowledge of America's vicious racial legacy. Franklin researched America's story of slavery and freedom in segregated archives. He was relegated to separate tables and irregular library hours so that white patrons would not be exposed to a literate black man researching Southern history. Franklin uncovered the vicious legacy of our racial past and engaged in decades of the struggle to change our racial present: from marching in Selma to endorsing Barack Obama.
Close friends and fellow scholars of Franklin — Duke University English Professor Karla Holloway, co-founder of the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies, and New York University professor and author David Levering Lewis — discuss why both the passion and the work of John Hope Franklin will live on.
Evolutionary Momentum in African American Studies:
Legacy and Future Directions
Clark University (Worcester, MA), DanaCommons 2nd floor
Friday, February 27
4:30RegistrationOpens
5:00-6:00Welcome Reception
“Paul Buono Jazz Trio”
6:15-7:15Buffet Supper
7:30-8:45Presentations by Students of Professor Winston Napier
William Cobb (Clark BA ‘08):
Mark Duhaime (Clark Senior ‘09):
Pamela Taylor (Clark BA ‘08):
Tracy Walsh (Clark BA ‘07):
Respondent: Magdalena Rabidou (Clark BA ‘08)
Saturday, February 28
9:00Registration and Continental Breakfast
9:15Welcome
9:30-10:45Transnational Influences of African American Culture
§Barry Gaspar (DukeUniversity): “Atlantic Subjects: Countering Enslavement in the Early 1700s”
§Allison Blakely (BostonUniversity): “The Influence of Afro-America on Emerging Afro-Europe”
§R. Victoria Arana (HowardUniversity): “Winston Napier’s Bridge ‘across the Pond’: Theorizing Black British Authority”
11:00-12:00Keynote Address
§Karla FC Holloway (DukeUniversity): "Home Invasions--A Narrative Ethic of Race and Privacy"
12:00-1:30ConferenceLuncheon
1:45-3:00Rethinking Black Aesthetics
§Ousmane Power-Greene (ClarkUniversity): “The Disorder of Things: The Literary Criticism and Theory of Hubert H. Harrison”
§Jarrett Brown (BowdoinCollege): “The Maroon Intellectual: Reading Claude McKay’s Correspondences”
§Carol Bailey (AmherstCollege): “Centering the Back-ups: Revisiting the Performative in Kate Rushin's Poetry"
§James Smethurst (University of Massachusetts-Amherst): “Live a Change: The Legacy of Black Arts in the Age of Obama”
3:15-4:30Mediating Black Identities: Newspapers, Photography, Literary
Magazines, and More
§Amritjit Singh (OhioUniversity): “’Elephant’s Dance’: Wallace Thurman the Instigator and Public Intellectual of the Harlem Renaissance”
§Daniel Scott, III (Rhode IslandCollege): “Image and Community in the Pages of Atlanta Daily World”
§Kate Capshaw Smith (University of Connecticut-Storrs): “Photography, Civil Rights, and African American Childhood”
§Ayesha Hardison (OhioUniversity): “Reading and Redefining Womanhood in Maud Martha”
4:30-5:30“These—Are—the "Breaks”: A Roundtable Discussion on
Teaching the Post-Soul Aesthetic
§Mark Anthony Neal (DukeUniversity)
§Crystal Anderson (ElonUniversity)
§Bert Ashe (University of Richmond)
Download the conference registration form here, or contact Shirley Riopel Nelson at 508.793.7142 or napierconference@clarku.edu; conference fee $25 ($5 for students).
Sponsored by the Higgins School of Humanities, the Office of the President, the Office of the Provost, and the Department of English
