We Want the Airwaves - Ajuan Mance

Nia King: So I recently participated in an event that you organized.

Ajuan Mance: Ah, yes.
Nia: I thought that you were the sole organizer, but were thereAjuan: No.
Nia: OK. (laughs)
Ajuan: I'm the sole organizer for the Mills event.
Nia: OK.
Ajuan: But not for the net- Well, it's a regional organization called Art of Living Black.
It is African-American, or actually it's not just African-American, it's artists of African
descent, self-identified, from the Bay-Area, mostly East Bay, and between January and
usually everything's done by the end of March, we have a series of shows. There's a big
show at the Richmond Art Center with a very big opening, it's really a great event.
Depending on the year it's anywhere from about 50 to about 90 artists, and then there are
a bunch of satellite shows. Sometimes CBS actually has satellite shows, several galleries
in the area, um
Nia: CBS like the television station?
Ajuan: Yeah. The Commonwealth Club has had satellite shows, and then there's an openNia: That's in San Francisco?
Ajuan: That's right, and so both sides of the Bay do satellite shows, and then we have an
open studios weekend, and so there's a map I guess that's the biggest part of the event,
is that we print out, the organizers print out a map, and then Mills is one of the open
studios locations. We like to have as many places where people can go and see several
artists at one place so that they can at least hit a whole bunch of artists and not have to
drive that far. We have some people who just open up their homes.
The organization was founded by these two African-American women artists, Lorraine
Hart-Schuyers and, uh, why am I forgetting Rae's name- Rae Hayward. Rae Louise
Hayward. She's the person I knew. By the time I joined the organization the other woman
had already died, and we have an award in her name every year for three artists who will
then be the featured artists next year. Featured artists get a whole section of a wall and
they get to do several pieces.
Nia: And that's at the Richmond art gallery?

Ajuan: And that's at the Richmond Art Center who have been really support over the
years and let us have our show in the space from usually late December all the way
through early March. And then Rae Louise Hayward is the person who invited me into
the organization to participate. And it's not juried, so anyone who identifies as Black and
identifies as artist can participate. Sadly enough, it was really tragic, Rae died several
years ago, both women of cancer. Women's Cancer Resource Center has also been very
supportive of our organization, they have satellite shows as well. But the one thing I can
always say about Rae was that she made all of us feel like we were real artists. If the
newspapers wanted to feature some work she really distributed it amongst the different
artists, had us interviewed, she made sure there were artist talks, and she really made this
event happen every year, calling people up saying you know, the deadline was
yesterday.
Nia: (laughs)
Ajuan: I need you to bring your art (laughs)
Nia: I feel like that's so much of what a curator does. (laughs)
Ajuan: I tell ya. In the interim her family has taken over over the years. There's been a
lot of losses, which have been really tragic. Some of the people who have then stepped in
to her place afterwards, Melba Lazenby, who's her sister-in-law. She then took over and
did a wonderful job doing the same thing. Melba died last December and Melba's
husband has now stepped in, Henry, and you know he's been doing a great job making
this happen. And so, it's a close knit group and it's kind of like going to a college reunion
when we see each other up in December when we're dropping off our art, lots of hugs and
over 10, 15 years we've all gotten to really know each other. It's a great group.
Nia: That's awesome. I think it's so cool that the big show is in Richmond because I feel
like generally everything art-related in the Bay tends to be concentrated in San Francisco
and then less so the East Bay but then less-less so in Richmond, even though I haven't
been to the Richmond Art Center, is that's what it's called?
Ajuan: Right, right.
Nia: But it seems like a great space.
Ajuan: It's amazing. It's large, it's oddly enough attached to the police station. (both
laugh)
Nia: Interesting.
Ajuan: It is. It's kind of an odd one. When I first got up there I was like Ahhh, I gotta
get used to this. But the main gallery is beautiful and they maintain it very well, big
white walls, high ceilings, and there are two other gallery spaces, so they do a range of

shows. I mean they bring in some remarkable artists. A lot of Bay-Area connected people
who've done political art for a while, they had some folks who were doing political
posters back in the 60's and 70's. It's one of the most memorable shows I've seen. But just
really wonderful artists, and a real emphasis of artists of color. And then also things like
they have some amazing shows of local youth artists, of artists with intellectual
disabilities. They have had some amazing shows, and then photography projects that high
schools have done. And then of course the main gallery every year really lights up for me
when we have our Art of Living Black show. People show up from all over, and you
know I hadn't thought about this until you mentioned it because my introduction to
Richmond was Art of Living Black, so for me it's always felt like an arts place. But yeah,
every year when we have our opening people come from all over the Bay Area including
San Francisco to this place, and I think it's a great way for Richmond to feature what it
does, and it remains affordable for artists. Some of our artists live in Richmond. Some of
them moved to Richmond so that they could buy homes and still live as an artist.
Nia: Yeah, no, I think that's kind of sort of what I was getting at. I keep thinking of the
National Queer Arts Festival and how it tends to be very heavily centered, I think you
can't get funding to do a showI think that's changing this yearunless it's in San
Francisco, and so that way a lot of arts money and like, queer arts money gets spent in
San Francisco. But it's like, people of color and a lot of queer people can't afford to live in
San Francisco. (laughs)
Ajuan: That's right.
Nia: And especially Black people. Like the outmigration of Black folks from San
Francisco has been making headlines for years now, because their I think their Black
population is down from 5% to like 3% over the last like... (laughs)
Ajuan: Wow. (laughs)
Nia: But that should be fact-checked, I'm not 100 percent positive on that. But it's super
small, and I feel like yeah, Richmond doesn't get a lot of love but it's still a place where
Black people and artists and Black artists can afford to live, in an increasingly
unaffordable Bay Area.
Ajuan: Right. Art is sustainable there.
Nia: How long have you been involved with the Art of Living Black?
Ajuan: Probably sinceI came to the Bay Area in 99maybe 2001? I think 2001 might
have been the first year.
Nia: How long have you been doing visual art?
Ajuan: Well, I always say there have been two things I have been my whole life, and one
is Black and the other is an artist. (laughs) And the other is a nerd.

Nia: (laughs)
Ajuan: All three are very true. And so art has always been a part of my life, forever.
It wasn't until, weirdly enough, it was after I was a professor for my first year. After grad
school I got my first job. I taught at the University of Oregon, and at the end of that year,
almost the moment I turned in my grades, I just had this overwhelming feeling that I need
to do art, I need to take it seriously, and I need to develop an art practice that leads me
down a path of some sort of creative inquiry. Somehow working 100 percent, putting all
of my energy into the academy made it really clear to me that this thing that has always
come fairly easily to me, I'm very passionate about but I've never taken it very seriously,
needs to really become a central part of my life. That was in 1996. So that's when I got
really serious and started buying art supplies and working on usingI wanted to develop
a permanent medium, and I can't do oil, and so I started working in acrylics and I started
teaching myself how to use acrylics, and so I guess now that's been almost 20 years.
Nia: So, I know you first as my former professor. (laughs)
Ajuan: Oh, right!
Nia: I took your 20st Century African-American Literature Class and so that's how I know
you. I didn't find out you were a visual artist until later, I think
Ajuan: Ohhh!
Nia: --and then also I'd see you around at QPOC stuff.
Ajuan: Oh right, right. (laughs)
Nia: And then also your partner was in a class that I taught, a stand-up comedy class.
Ajuan: Which was so bizarre. You're one of the people who've I've actually had in a class
who I see around more than anyone else, in very positive contexts (both laugh) which is
also a plus.
Nia: Thats good. (laughs) That's cool because I know you first as an academic and an
intellectual. It's cool to find out that you have this very long running art project. How
long have you been doing 1001 Black Men?
Ajuan: I have been doing the project since June of 2010. One could say I have a lifetime
of practice leading me toward that because I always have drawn more men than women.
Nia: That's one thing I wanted to ask you about, why men?
Ajuan: You know, that's an interesting question, and I'll just say as an aside that when I
turned 40, I had an art show that was a retrospective from 4 to 40 (laughs) and just for

that day I brought a bunch of art my mother sent me, drawings that I did when I was four
or something.
Nia: Where was this?
Ajuan: I actually had it at Mills. We rented out the alumni house.
Nia: OK.
Ajuan: And I invited a bunch of people and had my art all over the place and I hadn't
looked at the art in a long time, and especially the art from middle school. I realized that I
have never kept a journal because I start to bore myself after awhile. Today I had
breakfast. I just don't know what to say.
Nia: That's a funny thing to hear from a literature professor.
(both laugh)
Ajuan: I tried so many times even in the last couple of years. I want to do a journal but
I realized my art is so revealing, and when I started looking through it I realized, Oh my
goodness, this is kind of telling my whole story. One of the things I realized, I was
drawing a lot of men, particularly through high school and I really love particularly very
a lot of classic clothing and especially men's clothing Brideshead Revisited and Chariots
of Fire and all those great cricket sweaters and everything. I drew a lot of folks dressed in
those clothes. Sometimes I just drew those clothes when I was in high school. I had great
art training in my high school.
I was not really particularly interested in drawing femininity because I don't find it
particularly compelling as a line of inquiry, and art is really a thing for me to explore and
enjoy and kind of really get into every aspect, every dimension of stuff I'm really into. In
research that's what I do. I'm very into African American history, so I love reading 19th
century literature and doing research on it. I have questions about things about which I'm
passionate, and I think I'm more passionate about maleness and masculinity and more
interested in it because it's something I kind of, I find I more relatable. I feel like I kind of
understand femininity because it was the thing that was kind of given to me and handed
to me as the thing I probably want to try out and adopt and I chose otherwise, but I've
always been much more interested in drawing masculinity for as long as I can remember.
Nia: That's a great transition into asking about your book Constructing Black
Womanhood because you said you've always found masculinity more interesting, but then
you wrote this book about Black women.
Ajuan: I did, I did.
Nia: (laughing) What does constructing Black womanhood mean?

Ajuan: You know I definitely identified as a woman but for me that's not really a
gendered term, it's really about the body I inhabit. For myself, I'm really comfortable
saying I'm a woman who is gender non-conforming and feels more connected to male
clothing and stereotypically male stuff. Never really thought about it too much until I
moved to the Bay Area. (laughs) It's just never been a difficult thing for me.
One of the things that I find really interesting as someone who identifies as a woman but
is non-gender conforming is that when you walk in the world as a woman who is Black
there's certain meanings that people associate with your body. I mean in some ways
femininity is something that has never really been it's a hard-won identity for people
who walk around in Black bodies. So I'm really interested in how women of African
descent have negotiated that space, have negotiated the space of inhabiting themselves,
understanding who they are, or who they want to be, but always walking in a world that
even in Blackness doesn't really create a space for them to be those things.
Womanhood has always been gendered white in the U.S. and Blackness has always been
gendered male, you know? Black people who are not women, who don't identify as
women, and women who don't identify as Black have played a very strong role in
enforcing that, and giving Black women basically no space in which to, you know, it's the
classic intersectionality argument. And so whenever we talk about intersectionality a lot
of times we're talking about the 20th century and we're talking about the notion of the
women's movement that says that Black women have to participate as women, or the
nationalist movement that say Black women have to participate as Black. But I was really
interested in looking backwards and starting with where that idea became-what role does
literature have in perpetuating this idea?
Nia: That Black women can never be woman enough or Black enough?
Ajuan: Right. And so you know it took me back to the mid-19th century when we see, I
won't go into a lot of detail, but when labor moves from the home to a workplace away
from the home, all kinds of things ensue, and thats really I think when we see
codification of women as raced and classed identity.
Nia: Could you say a little more about that?
Ajuan: So the notion that certainly Black women have had an uphill battle. You know,
anyone who identifies as woman and Black at the same time, being visible as such is a
challenge. So Black women from the first time that Europeans encountered sub-Saharan
Africans, for some reasons Europeans had trouble understanding that these are human
beings, and that those human beings experience themselves as gendered. But certainly
slavery in the United States does not make space for Black people to have gender or sex
self-determination. They take meanings for those bodies and they project them, and they
use those bodies, literally, in the ways they see fit. But in particular the notion that to be a
woman you need to withdraw humbly into the home, and that your life is
circumscribed that, that excludes almost all Black women at the time, certainly because
of slavery. In 1850 89% of Black people were enslaved. We can certainly imagine that the

overwhelming majority of that 11% free, those women had to work.

If you work outside the home, you're not a woman. So it also excludes a whole lot of
immigrant women who are white. Immigrant women of all races, many of whom were
poor, so the race and the class thing overlay in a way that never has served Black women.
Womanhood is white, and womanhood is middle-class, at least. So given that, how have
Black woman found a space to inhabit both of those identities, Blackness and
womanhood? And so I spend some time in my book and the introduction looking at the
poetry of the time by white women that in some ways develops a really elaborate set of
symbols to reinforce the idea that womanhood is very specific things, that working-class
women of all races and that women of African descent can't measure up to, so to speak.
Not that one would really necessarily want to have this humble withdrawal, but if
womanhood means these specific things, most women are not going to be able to fit into
that identity.
And then I started to look at women in the late 19th century, when Black women start
writing poetry that really pushes back against all of these ideas showing that's women's
labor in the home is actually work. So those women who have humbly withdrawn into
they home, they're working too. They really start to critique by making Black women
visible in specific ways. Of course this is poetry that hardly anybody is reading, outside
the Black readership. But still it's important and it's really amazing when you compare it
to poetry in the Harlem Renaissance, which, really in that poetry a lot of Black women
seem to retreat back into these very stereotyped, very limiting notions of womanhood as
domesticity-based. It's really bizarre.
Nia: Do you think that that has to do with achieving economic means that would enable
that?
Ajuan: Certainly the women poets of the Harlem Renaissance are overwhelmingly elite.
The poets of the Harlem Renaissance are. But I make an argument that it about with its
also visibility. Those Black women poets of the 19th century, I always say they kind of
wrote for a parlor audience of people, often people who knew them. They certainly
appeared in a lot of the African-American publications, but they didn't have as much
power in literature, some did, but when we're talking specifically about the poets, when
we get to the Harlem Renaissance there are women like Jessie Fauset who in some ways
ran the literary section of the most important magazine of Black people of that time, The
Crisis. So Black women in some ways trade this enhanced visibility for signing on to the
notion of Blackness as male. So if you're going to talk about race and you're going talk
about raced experiences those are going to be the experiences of men. You can talk about
womanhood, and what people might stereotypically call women's stuff, but those need
to be deracinated figures, and they need to be very, very stereotypically feminized.
When in grad school I started to read Black women's poetry of the Harlem Renaissance
I'm like there's so much of this, why is it never taught? I think it's never taught because
it's not what people were expecting. I think it's hard for 21st century readers to find it
usable, and to find access. Some of those women are very talented, and powerful writers

but there is a degree of which when they talk about racism they somehow have to
articulate it through the lens of maleness and masculinity, so they write to demand a
better world for their sons. They write to encourage their sons to grow up and fight. You
don't see a lot of Black women speaking subjects who are addressing specifically their
experiences of racism as Black people who are women.
Nia: Wow, that's super interesting. So you feel like the reason, when you say their poetry
isn't usable you mean because it contradicts what we want to think about women of color
in that time in that era?
Ajuan: You know, there's this scholar Nellie McKay, the late Nellie McKay who's an
amazing African-American woman scholar, and she and Henry Louis Gates were the
people who created the first Norton Anthology of African-American literature back in '97,
and one of the things she said when they were interviewed about this on, I think it was
CNN or PBS, but in the interview she said when we look back to early writers we look
back for the roots of what we have of today. Where do we first start to see that? And
Black women's writing from the 1970s on was known for outspoken representations and
unflinching representations of Black women's lives. The struggles the celebrations, but
being very Black women-centered, that's why it became so popular across races,
particularly races of women, because it was one of those literatures, one of those few
literatures that's about the experiences of people who identify as women and privileging
those perspectives regardless of what other people thought of about it. And of course you
know about the controversy of Ntozake's For Colored Girls and Alice Walker's The
Color Purple and Gloria Naylor, you know they're saying bad things about Black men.
They were privileging what they felt like they as Black women needed to say and what
they wanted other Black women hear.
Nia: And that was blasphemy?
Ajuan: Well it was very controver- I tell you, there were some serious battles. Every
time I looked at PBS for awhile Barbara Smith was debating one or another AfricanAmerican male writer about how are Black women representing Black men, but that has
become our expectation. And when we're looking atNia: To uplift Black men?
Ajuan: Um, well, no, in terms of why were don't read the Harlem Renaissance. Our
expectation is that Black women's literature is going to be about Black women's
emancipation, freedom, and candor, about the reality of our experience, our celebrations
and our hurts.
Nia: So if it's not then it's not usable?
Ajuan: Right, well it doesn't do- In some ways I would say that some of that literature
from the 20s doesn't do what we as readers today we would want that literature to do for
us because in some ways it seems to be defaulting to something against which we've been

writing now for the last 40, 50 yearsthe de-centering of Black women's experience in
Black women's own works. So in some ways, you know, a lot of our pursuit of history is
not simply because we want to know what happened in the past. It's self serving.
Even with my own research when I realized there was Black literary community in the
1820s it became very self-serving. It made me feel different as a scholar. To know that I
was not I'm certainly not a pioneer, I'm not the first Black professor or anything, but
the idea that there were Black folks who cared about the stuff I cared about, in the city
outside of which I grew up, made me feel a sense of belonging as a person of letters that I
didn't even know I hadnt felt. And this was my experience as a tenured professor. I
realized there was a sense of belonging I hadn't felt until I discovered that there
were people with my interest and my priorities, Black nerds who liked to read and
write a lot, in a critical mass, in the city I that love, in the 1820s. It changed my
relationship to the academy, and outside of academia, to my relationship as a reader
and a writer and a lover of the written word.
And so, our pursuit of history is very self-serving. In many cases it's where the passion
comes from. It doesn't mean that's bad history or bad research, the best research, because
we want to uncover these stories that are transformative. But we also want bring voice to
these people who If we don't know these things exist these folks are voiceless in the
20th century. So by saying it's self-serving I'm not necessarily saying it's a bad thing, but I
am saying that especially as marginalized folks, I would say this about queer and trans
folks too, we're looking back to try to find things that in some way give us something
give us some shoulders on which to climb, that give us that gives us a foundation on
which to rest and from which to build. The idea of inventing everything is very daunting,
and that's why it's so important for LGBTQs, people of color, folks who inhabit both
identities, to know our history and pursue that, but when history's not usable for us, when
it tells us some stories that are kind of wonky.
Nia: That we don't want to hear?
Ajuan: We don't, we really don't. I've been reading some 19th century African work that's
complicated like that, and I look back on it and I wonder what people are going to think
when they read some of this stuff.
Nia: Are you talking about for your new book?
Ajuan: Right, right. I've been rereading all the works that are in the new book over the
last several days and revisiting some of the work. Some of what I find so exciting when I
read this work is that Black perspectives and experiences are so much more diverse than
history has allowed us to experience and understand. And if that's diverse, if those
perspectives are diverse, what it means is that some people are saying things that will
make us very uncomfortable and I kind of am into that. I really like when people refuse
what to be what we want them to be. In some ways when we go back and uncover
writings that haven't been looked at, that no one has paid attention to, one of the things
that is so important is that they just kind of challenge us to re-imagine ourselves when we

realize how much more possibility there was in the past. And so I'm kind of into that.
Nia: Could you give an example of a work that you've been working with where you're
like I don't know how people will feel about this?
Ajuan: Well, The easy one to say is this guy William Hannibal Thomas who really was
kind of, he was I won't say he was a nightmare, I'll say he was a difficult man.
Nia: (laughs)
Ajuan: He was a man of African decent. To make a long story short, he wrote a bunch of
essays and letters and did a whole lot of different jobs through his life, and then in 1901
or 1902 he published this book called The American Negro. In effect what he said was
everything you thought about Black people, they are those things. They are lazy, they are
hyper-sexual, they steal. It's confounding to 21st century readers. Its so confounding that a
recent historian went back and did this exhaustive study of this man's life trying in effect

Nia: To figure out what went wrong? (laughs)

Ajuan: To figure out what's up with this guy, that he's going to write a book that says that
everything white racists and slavery apologists say about Black people is true? Why
would a person of African descent write this? Of course it was picked up by white racists
partisans including Thomas Dickson who wrote the book that went on to become the film
Birth of a Nation. The book is called Black Judas, by the way, the history book in which
the historian goes back and tries to figure out what's up with this guy's life. Where did
this turn happen? It was an award-winning book, it was exhaustively researched.
Nia: Did they come up with a root for his self-hatred?
Ajuan: Um you know, really it's about the notion of ambivalence about his relationship
to Blackness, having experienced some a lot of racism. But in some ways having at
certain times of life had forms of privilege also.
Nia: So they chalked it up to him being privileged?
Ajuan: Well, they chalked it up to him reacting badly to, in some ways scapegoating, in
some ways being angry at Blackness for the ways in which it didn't deliver him into the
life in which he had hoped. He ended up being a person who had a lot of struggles, some
which he caused himself.
Nia: (laughs) How so?
Ajuan: At various point there are places where he lied about certain credentials, and he
did some kind of irresponsible things in his jobs. I guess maybe the best way to say this is
he was an angry man with a complex relationship to his identity, and it became anger at

Blackness. It's probably his most successful piece of writing, this book.
But people who didn't hate Black people also A guy who is really famous and an
amazing Black pioneer who wrote the novel Clotel which was the paradigmatic so-called
tragic mulatto novel of the antebellum period, and wrote the first Black history book,
he wrote the first Black travelogue, he wrote a three volume history of Black people, the
first Black travel book, he had a lot of firsts, the first Black history first Black
professionally-published novel. And then later in life he wrote a book called My Southern
Home. And in that bookand slavery has long been over by this timein he is weirdly
nostalgic for the plantation from which he escaped, the plantation where he was born and
raised. Actually I think he escaped from other people than this, who took him on vacation
in Ohio, which is kind of weird idea to do with an enslaved person who can read and
write.
Nia: (laughs)
Ajuan: I'm glad his owners weren't terribly bright but that was a ridiculous idea. But then
he writes about Black people he writes about them with this bizarre this distance from
them.
Nia: Double-consciousness?
Ajuan: Yeah, and he's a person at this time and one of the things I think is shocking is
how people understand relationships between race, multiracial/multi-ethnic identity, and
things like propriety, chastity, intelligence, and just being a good person. (laughs) I think
people would be uncomfortable with the degree to which people associated lightness and
mixed race identity with being smarter, being prettier, being more moral. I think overall
that's one of the most surprising things about the literature, in term of things that would
be shocking and uncomfortable to people.
Nia: I think it strikes me as not shocking because we still hear that today. (laughs) I guess
going back in history I would expect people to be, I would expect to find more colorism
rather than less, does that make sense?
Ajuan: Yeah, yeah it does. And in fact there is much more colorism. I will say maybe it's
my own sheltered environment, but (laughs) I have been stunned by the amount of
colorism and just the openness about it, the values associated with certain ways of
looking. But then you have people like this guy Alexander Crummell who's very, very
proud to be what he would describe as pure African and you have these key moments
in literature when people, some of the same people who you might think, hmm, they
way they're talking about color feels a little weird, but at the same time they'll greatly
praise someone's beauty who is, they will say pure African or very dark.
In some ways people are all over the place and that is what is so exciting for me
Blackness is so many different things and the politics of it and the culture of it is so broad
and there's so many different ways of being Black even though we're only hearing form a

very small percentage of people, but those people represent such a diversity of ideas, and
I think it's a lesson for today. There was a lot of debate and a lot of discussion and people
were not afraid to go out on a limb and say a completely outrageous things.
It made for a richness of conversation around race because one of the things we did see
was, you know certainly some people were ostracized for their ideas, but I'm just
impressed by the degree of debate around various meanings and ideas of this time. I feel
like it's liberating for contemporary Black people to know that there was debate and there
were many different ideas and possibilities at that time when people had so much less
possibility. So certainly today when were should embrace a lot of ways of should be a lot
of different ways of thinking and talking about race.
Nia: The sense I'm getting from you is that there was this diversity of thought within the
Black community that we have somehow, that at some point in history was lost or
constrained?
Ajuan: I would say this, and it's funny because I've been thinking a lot about art and I've
been reading a lot of these texts but I haven't been thinking about the big idea, but I
would say this, because I'm a 19th century specialist I'm not sure I know, I haven't read
enough about the breadth of ways that people think about race in the 21th century to say
there was more diversity of thought at that time than now.
Nia: I guess I'm going back to this idea of history of that we can use, and the idea of
history that we can't use getting lost or intentionally erased, and so I think what I'm really
thinking about is how Black nationalism constricted what was an appropriate way to be
Black or what was appropriate to say as a Black person, and I also wonder if you to some
extent blame hip-hop? (laughs)
Ajuan: (laughs) I was just thinking about this just about a year ago, about the
relationship between hip hop and Black nationalism. The politics, the aesthetics, the
language of hip hop draws so heavily on the language of Black nationalism. There's a
wonderful scholar who used to be my colleague at the University of Oregon named Karen
Ford, and she wrote a bookcalled, I think it's Moments of Brocade and it's about excess,
the uses of excess, and in the language of certain poets. One of the poets she talks about
is Amiri Baraka and the language of excess. His language of excess, it's kind of like racial
signifying. How outrageous can you be to show your wit, but also to get people's
attention?
Hip hop definitely jumps right in and draws on that, and people have made this directs
connection from hip-hop to early traditions like pimp narratives, and toasting traditions,
and folk tales but I also think hip-hop draws directly on the signifying tradition thats
filtered through nationalism. You know, excess as a statement of your rebellion from
mainstream politics, mainstream mores, from what you're supposed to be and dothat
push back. Certainly signifying goes way back but the particular way that signifying
manifests in hip-hop

Nia: Would you mind explaining the term for folks who may not know?
Ajuan: Ohh, wow...
(both laugh)
Ajuan: I think if you really want to have a deep and rich understanding of hip-hop you
should read Henry Louis Gates, Jrs The Signifying Monkey, so I'll just say that as just a
caveat. But signifying for me is all about that African diasporic aesthetics of excess, so
that aesthetic isn't just the idea of something that's just empirically beautiful, but there's
beauty in how excessive you can be. Beauty in wittily pushing the limits your in terms of
your language and your speech, and then there's the degree your effectiveness in doing
that also become this way of establishing social hierarchies within friend groups and
within culture. We talk a lot about signifying with language, yo mama jokes for
example, and playing the dozens, but those are kind of the paradigmatic examples that a
lot of scholars like to use. We cannot not notice the way that you can signify by how you
walk down the street, you can signify with your car, you can signify by the way you
move your head when you talk to someone, you know? So signifying becomes this larger
way of inhabiting the world from, rooted in this Afro-diasporic thing. It's about an
aesthetics, it's almost like I always think of the notion of variations on a theme, in
some ways signifying to me is kind of taking the theme and turning it until it's not quite
ridiculous, but really creative, really interesting, and a little bit out of bounds. I think a lot
of why hip-hop upsets some people so much is because people don't understand what
signifying is really all about.
I really like a lot of the raps by the rapper Too $hort. And Too $hort says some things that
sometimes I find when I think about it out of context, even in context I'm like Hmm,
that's kind of difficult for me to hear. But then I again I also think that the character, the
persona he's putting on as Shorty the Pimp is signifying all over the place. The idea of
just saying something because it's outrageous and funny and part of the humor is the
audacity of that statement. Some people are really good at it, some people are just terrible
at it so it just feels like hate. And then there's the degree to which one wonders how
much I would say not everyone who is kind of drawing on the signifying tradition
knows that they're signifying. You know, the whole idea of hip-hop being about what's
real takes a lot of the play out of it, but for many artists a lot of it is about playfulness,
sometimes playing with really hard stuff that sometimes from a mainstream American
perspective you're not supposed to play with. But when it comes to signifying in some
ways the rules are there are no rules.
Nia: Yeah. (laughs) Sorry, you're so smart, it's really overwhelming. (laughs)
Ajuan: That's very kind.
Nia: (laughs) Sometimes when I talk to academics it's a little hard to like... (laughs) reel
them in.

Ajuan: Oh, (laughs) I can understand that.

Nia: It's all really good stuff. But I think I want to come back to Black nationalism
because I think it has so much to do with the frame through which Im understanding the
things you're saying about Black literature historically. I feel like it was Richard Wright
you would clearly know this better than Iwho had a very strong stance that art should
be political and uplift the Black race, and that that is purpose of Black art and the
function of Black art, is to serve that political end, is that wrong?
Ajuan: You know, probably. I've read a lot of Richard Wright's work, but I have not done
a lot of reading about what he thought.
Ajuan: He's an intense guy.
Nia: (laughs)
Ajuan: Very intense. Not a feminist.
Nia: (laughs) Unlike Too $hort.
Ajuan: Unlike Too $hort who is out there, he's a card carrying member of NOW. I have
to say, just as an aside, Richard Wright's The Man Who Killed the Shadow, if people don't
understand the effect that racial terrorism like lynching, has on people's psyche, they need
to read The Man Who Killed The Shadow. I've never read anything before or since that
explains that more clearly. It's just a profound short story. Richard Wright's Eight Men
great book, great book of short stories.
Nia: I mean he's mostly well known for Native Son and Black Boy.
Ajuan: Black Boy. And people use those texts to very problematic ends sometimes in
their teaching them. But, mine is not to judge.
Nia: (laughs) Well, I don't even know if it was him.
Ajuan: I know that W.E.B. DuBois had that notion, that Black art needs to be about
uplifting Black people and it's something that the Black writers of the Harlem
Renaissance struggled with.
Nia: And resisted, I think, in a lot of ways.
Ajuan: Yes, certainly did. I mean, people like Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown who,
instead of writing in say, the sonnet form or the villanelle, the sestina, all these Europeanbased forms, put their ear to the ground and they listened to the forms that Black people
created in American. I love Sterling Brown's work. Langston Hughes is a lot more
famous, and I love Langston Hughes for using the blues in the same way that some of his
colleagues were writing amazing sonnets. Claude McKay's sonnets are incredible, but

Langston Hughes blues poems are so wonderful and so beautiful to me because they
come out of one of the genres that Black people created here to speak to their experience
of what it is to be this identity that only exists out of the Middle Passage. It's powerful.
Nia: Yeah. I'm going to try to articulate this again. In terms of the way that Black
nationalism affects the way that we understand Black literature today, I think what I was
trying to get at is that there's this paradigm or framework for understanding the at the
things Black people say, which is either they're uplifting the race or they're not uplifting
the race. (laughs) I wish the listeners could see the face you're making right now.
Ajuan: (grumbles)
Nia: Either you're saying the things you want us to say or you're Uncle Tom, essentially.
Ajuan: It's kind of harsh.
Nia: Yeah, it's extremely narrow and limiting but I guess I understand that framework as
coming from Black nationalism. So when I listen to you talk about the man who wrote
the book saying Black people are everything you're saying you are, oh well, there's the
archetypical Black man who's not saying what you want him to say, therefore he's an
Uncle Tom, we discredit this, he's doing the work of the white supremacist. But it's such
an incredibly limiting way to look at Does that framework play a role in the way that
you look back at Black literature historically?
Ajuan: It does. It definitely has. Actually, I'm really that glad you said this because I had
not necessarily thought about that in relationship to 19th century text. It certainly has
historically as in the 60s on and difference writing say in the 70s and 80s and writing
now, I think is all about people negotiating their relationship to this idea that there's a way
to be traitorous to Black people on paper. And I believe there is. I mean William Hannibal
Thomas's book is highly problematic.
Nia: Do you think that idea didn't exist at the time he was writing?
Ajuan: You know, I think it did, and people where shocked and horrified by that book,
except white supremacists who thought it was awesome!
Nia: Just what we've been looking for!
Ajuan: Right. Finally a Black person who tells the truth! Forget the other 600 of them.
But I think that book is really problematic. I would say less problematic William Wells
Brown looking back and in some way, finding I mean this is a man who had to go to
Europe while abolitionists tried to negotiate for real freedom for him, he'd escaped, but
he technically wasn't free. So he had to go there, just like Douglass did while people tried
to work out the details of actually emancipating him. But what I love about the fact that
William Wells Brown was able to write this book late in life look back at his plantation
life and talk about how beautiful that house was makes me incredibly feel uncomfortable.

But what I also see is someone whose freedom has been really internalized, like that he
can hate slavery and wrote very effectively about why slavery is a horrible institution,
and yet he doesn't hate who he is.
It reminds me of, I don't know why I can't remember her name, but there's this writer who
in the New York Times is a trans columnist and I can't remember her name she's an
amazing writer, wrote a column about looking back on her boyhood with nostalgia and
thinking about how cool it was to just ride a bike a day long, and a lot of people felt, a lot
of cisgender people felt, she was being untrue to the trans cause. But we've accepted you
as this. You can't mess with out heads and be happy about having been this! And I what
thought here's someone who inhabits their identity
Nia: You're complicating the trans narrative therefore you're setting us all back.
Ajuan: Exactly! And I thought what is up with cisgender folks don't who feel like she
can't own all of her life? She loves herself enough that she can she love the things about
being a boy that felt really good to her. And in some ways William Wells Brown, when he
looks back in this way that makes me feel uncomfortable, and says Boy, that house was
really beautiful, he's reached this point in his age and his freedom that he can still own
the things about being a boy that felt good to him even in that time
Nia: Even during slavery.
Ajuan: That no one could enslave the fact that he did in some moments have an eye for
beauty and pleasure. I feel like Black writers since nationalism have had to find a way to
write their truth in a ways that sometimes push back against the some of the boxes that
nationalism attempted to create. Octavia Butler's a perfect example. Michael Thomas's
intense Man Gone Down, in which he does four days in 400 pages, so many of the things
that he wrote would not have fit very well into the nationalist agenda. Asali Solomon's
Get Down in which she writes about queer Black manhood in one of her short stories,
queer Black manhood on an all Black men's college campus.
I often say to my students that today's writers are the freest that Black writers have ever
been because they're not anymore allowing themselves to think Is this good for Black
people or is it not? They're really thinking how do I pursue my line of artistic inquiry
into what Black experiences are in this setting or in this time period or what have you.
They're just being really audacious and they're making us by grow by sometimes writing
scenarios in which we're not comfortable.
The Black text is not a safe space, and when it is safe and everyone is saying everything
that makes Black people feel good about themselves all the time, then I don't think we're
growing. These texts, I found some of these 21st century writers, their work is just
absolutely exhilarating. A woman I know started reading a 21st century Pulitzer prize
winner, The Known World by Edward P. Jones, one of the best novels about slavery since
Song of Solomon I know who's now in her early 70s, I said This is a great book, you
gotta read this book. She about read the first probably 10 pages and put the book away.

She's like I can't read this. (laughs)

Nia: I think I had the same experience. (laughs)
Ajuan: Really?!
Nia: I think I tried to read it and did not get that far, but I'll give it another chance.
(laugh)
Ajuan: Give it the old college try. (laughs)
Nia: (laughs) But I'm not in college anymore, so there's no one to make me read it.
Ajuan: (laughs) That's true. It wasn't what she needed a Black text to be.
Nia: In what way?
Ajuan: Well, you know, it starts out with um what she, being in a very different
generation than I am, would probably say is, (imitates voice) It started out with an
episode of self-abuse (laughs) and that is not appropriate for a book about slavery.
Nia: It's a very unforgettable beginning to a book. (laughs)
Ajuan: It is, I have to say.
Nia: He's just out there in the woods.
Ajuan: Yeah, in the rain.
Nia: Yeah. (laughs)
Ajuan: Never mind that it's about an African-American person who owns slaves.
Nia: Oh, yeah I didn't get that far. (laughs)
Ajuan: That was the hook! (laughs) Edward P. Jones wrote a book about Black people
who owned slaves and it started flying off the shelves.
Nia: Maybe I did, maybe I just forgot about it. Anyway I'm going to cut all of this out.
Ajuan: So now you're making me think about these 19th century people, when we see
them writing these are folks who are who had to negotiate their freedom to have
oppositional, antagonistic, audacious ideas without any affirmation for their freedom
from the larger society, because the larger society didn't even think they should be
writing. So I wonder the degree to which the fact that there is a narrow space for the
Black writer and the Black thinker, to what degree have we created our own boxes, and

are fearful of pushing outside of them. We don't want to be untrue to what's truly
revolutionary. How have we set up our own I don't want to say litmus test because that
makes me sounds like I'm on Fox News. But have we created these spaces where there's
peer pressure to adhere to a particular way of depicting Black people?
With some of my paintings I've actually had people look at them and several times tell
me they look like caricatures that are derogatory. I had a show recently, I think in the
summer of 2013, one of the folks who worked at the place where the show was really had
a problem with them. I think she was embarrassed by the images.
People are always talking about noses, lips, and eyes if they feel like it's a derogatory
representation, and I always think it's interesting that people think way I do lips or noses
or eyes is racist or looks like those old caricatures, because I don't see that but also
because I'm starting with the features I like the best. I always start with the nose and then
go up to the eyes or down to the mouth, but I always do the center and then I start
working outward and so I emphasize these features because I love the ways that for a lot
of people regardless of skin color or dark or light, there are ways in which Blackness is
written on the body. Sometimes in really subtle ways sometimes in rather significant
ways. But the people take my love of these features for I think in some ways my
ridiculing of them, which is kind of intense. But I love that somehow I've just developed
an aesthetic that is without me even thinking about it pushing back against some sort of
orthodoxy against about what kind of Black people's features you're supposed to draw.
Nia: Yeah, I'm so glad you brought it back to that because I was like how are we going to
get from literature back to painting. I was looking at some of your work last night on your
blog and having some similar thoughts. I can see some similarities. Your aesthetic is
very you have a very unique style. The way you draw portraits is very stylized. Is it fair
to say features are exaggerated, or at least stylized?
Ajuan: Yeah, I think that's fair, I think my brand of stylized is probably exaggerated,
yeah.
Nia: My understanding is that the intent of your project, being to draw 1001 Black men,
is to showcase all these different types of Black masculinity and ways being Black men
of the diversity that exists within people that either identify themselves as or are read by
others as Black men. And the purpose of a caricature is to reduce something to a symbol
that is not human and not relatable, where as what you're doing is creating an archive of
the sort of different ways that Black men can look, so in that way I don't think it's
reinforcing stereotypes and I don't think they're caricatures. On the other hand, I think
because of the way that it's stylized and features are exaggerates I can sort of see how
people interpret that way. Does that make sense?
Ajuan: Yeah totally, totally.
Nia: You have such a distinct style and aesthetic. Did you start out drawing that way or is
it something you developed over time?

Ajuan: You know, I didn't start out drawing that way. At some point you'll probably be at
our house and I will trot out some high school drawings and I did a lot of very realistic
drawings and I look back on like Oooh, did I do that?
Nia: Because it's so good?
Ajuan: Yeah. (laughs) I haven't drawing in that realistic way in a long time with the
shading, and you know art class exercises. But I did a lot of line drawing, cartoon type of
drawings, and when I was trying to evolve my style kind of I felt that I needed a style
that (laughs) Summer of 96 I started doing this and I thought, I need something that is
going to take the part of art that I like the best, and in some way can maybe push beyond
just my doodles. I love drawing faces and I love drawing with pen and ink, so I spent the
summer drawing with huge pieces of paper probably like 24 by 36 and I just filled
them with faces. Faces of Black men and women. I thought I like the heavy Black line, I
like stained glass, and the way stained glass will use color. Several different shades of
green to give us a field of green.
I then I started just joining up the lines in faces and kind of breaking it up into planes so
that instead of drawing someone with cheekbones and then of shading them, kind of
using the line and just taking one piece of their face and that would be one color green,
and then I would do another piece that would be a slightly different shade of a similar
green and just influenced in some ways by stained glass and by my love of the heavy
Black line and by street art which I think is so awesome. People using Black lines and
color and wheat paste and making such cool work that is about this immediacy of
rendering an image. And of course a lot of street art takes forever and then people run out
and put it up. So I just try to bring all those things together.
But I needed it to be something that I could do not necessarily easily but that would give
me a lot of pleasure and I love to draw so I wanted to make a very drawing-centered
style.
Nia: Yeah, so the actually medium that you use for these is acrylic? The final pieces?
Ajuan: Well actually, for the pieces that are on the website those are all ink on paper and
then I scan then and I add color in Photoshop or a weird background. Photoshop
becomes you just go down the rabbit hole and next thing you know you're thinking, 12
hours later (both laugh), I have this amazing piece but where did my day go? The
biggest show I had was at CIIS and I showed 200 images from the website and then I did
10 paintings. The next 10 drawings I did as painting, as acrylic paintings. I did paint pen,
and acrylic paint and also found objects for those.
Nia: Awesome, that sounds super cool.
Ajuan: It's fun.