Episode 5: Incognito Academic: Pia Deas on How Intellectuals Meet the World

Follow your enthusiasm, and then [Pia: Yeah.] you kind of, like, throw the ball, and then follow the ball [laughs].

Correct.

I like it a lot!

Pia Deas is associate professor of English and associate dean of faculty at Lincoln University. She specializes in African American literature. On this episode of Many Academies, she’s talking us through the process of affirming the questions and methods they come to create for us a livable, academic path, dwelling on two projects: Ratoon, a multimedia performance Pia curated that enacts a creative and collaborative resistance to the brutal legacies of sugar cane plantations. And Pia’s podcast, The Contemporary Black Canvas. We try to identify the beautifully expensive ways that we are called to create and produce and teach in the Academy.

I’m Lette Bragg, and I’m beginning by asking Pia about the sources of her ethics and her creativity.

So, I’m a child of the 1970s, and so, black power and the black aesthetic, you know, were a really important part of that period. And even though I was, you know, a little girl that> really influenced, like, kind of my family’s positionality in the world. So, I am from a biracial family, and my mom is a white American and my dad is a black American, and he was very aware of kind of the racial times and my family as a whole was. And so they brought us—it’s myself, I have a younger sister and a younger brother. But particularly my sister and I are close in age. So, they they brought us up with a real sense of black pride. And so I can– I think that really shapes my whole trajectory. And so I think for me, my entry point is, I got interested in a series of questions that I am always kind of coming back to and interested in exploring, about, you know, black representation, about black intellectual traditions and artistic traditions, and always being engaged in those. And then I just find different kind of outlets and avenues. But the initial spark remains kind of the same across projects.

Yes! I thought this was the case. You know, I was looking at these different projects and I was thinking, they’re they’re all different in the kind of work that you are doing, but there has to be this— there’s one goal or purpose that’s kind of allowing you to bring them forward, right, this one purpose. So you mentioned, first of all, your upbringing, right? And I remember, [Pia: Yes.] I remember, listening to the introductory episode of The Contemporary Black Canvas and you’re talking about your childhood and James Brown would come on to the TV and everything with stop [Pia: Yeah.] and you would gather around James Brown to watch him and his moves. And so to me, it was the these two things came together in that story: creativity for you as a kind of, as a resistance, a mode of resistance that is crucial, and then also the formation of community and connections through creativity. Do you trace this through the different projects that you do?

1,000% and what I would say about that, and what I tell my students is that an intellectually engaged person is going to have a lot> of interests, right? A lot> of things that they like>. And then there are only, I would say, certain things that they love>. And for me, you know, through the PhD process, what I didn’t quite realize about myself is that I like books a lot, and I like people more now. [laughter>] So community, you know, the PhD process is just a different mode. It’s it’s more isolated, you’re in a room writing by yourself, you know, maybe you’re going to conferences, maybe you have a faculty mentor, maybe you have, you know, co-graduate students, but I don’t think I realized what a centerpiece community is for me and that it’s most meaningful if I can make intellectual knowledge in community with other people.

The podcast was a real example of what it also turns out is that I really, like basically, I had I had 23 questions that I asked every podcast guest that I had all written out. But I felt like the heart of the question was: tell me. Tell me how you got excited, tell me how you got interested, tell me what you know. And I really love that because I didn’t have to be the expert on anything, I was just sort of the curator and the curious listener. But I was really invested in celebrating what the guest knew, and what the guest was excited about. And, you know, I chose the people that I chose to represent—hese are all, black artists and intellectuals—and so, you know, a wide variety of genres, for instance, or a particular project that got my interest. And then I would interview them about their whole career trajectory. But I, I think part of it was that I like this idea of communal knowledge or communal benefits> of the knowledge, and that it’s most meaningful to me if I’m doing it in partnership with other people. And I think sometimes in academia it can skew a little bit more towards like competition as sort of the mode rather than like collaboration and cooperation and cohesion, so that I think that really drives a lot of my projects.

Yeah. That’s lovely. And I think that’s exactly what I want to do, just, just listen, and learn and see what comes out of that. And then also to move away from this kind of robust critical apparatus that I feel like I built up as a graduate student. And I would often find my legiblility or my academic viability within the critique of others. And then I found myself really interested in a different move that would also move me out of. I think you described it as this isolation into more of a building of something, or a networking of something. Do you find a tension between, like, creative work and critical work?

I think that as I have grown in my career, what I would say is I really just love appreciating. Yeah. And the other word that’s kind of coming to mind is affirmation. So, we worked for about a year on Ratoon and I had, you know I was the vision holder for that project, and then I brought together, you know master artists who are, you know, top in their own fields. And I had was sort of holding a vision for how I thought this could all sort of coalesce and work together, right? But it was such a big idea that was also hard to describe and I didn’t want to over, you know, prescribe like exactly what it was going to look like? I had some general kind of tenants, like, I did not want the, poem or the, the words of the piece to be narrative in the sense of like, you know, “Sheila woke up in the cane field,” right? I didn’t want it to be that, like a progressive narrative with, with characters and, a plot. So, I– that much I knew. And then I sort of kind of tossed out this sort of broad net, and it was all centered around Sasha Phyars-Burgess’s work that she had already collected.

So she had reached out to me. I had come across her work in a small gallery in Philadelphia, and then I brought her for, we had a first Mellon grant, so I brought her as part of that project to be a speaker. And then actually, like two years later, she just reached out via email and said, during Covid, and said, “Hey, I want to tell you about my latest projects.” And it was right at the moment at which I had this second grant and I needed to start utilizing the funds for that. And she just hit me on literally the day that I was thinking, “oh, I really have to get on that,” she reached out with this project.

The second grant is the Black Studies Revitalization Grant, and her project is everything that Black Studies embodies. It’s global, she’s traveling across, you know, the, several continents, she’s looking at sugarcane communities both historically and contemporarily, and talking about the impact that sugarcane production had on the African diaspora and Africa. And so that was all, you know, perfect for that.

And, and so that’s kind of how this idea came to be, and I think, right— So we’ve been working on this for a year and a couple of weeks before we were to put the whole thing together, my partner and I went to the new Jersey Performing Arts Center to see 100 year, like, celebration of, Max Roach’s, Freedom Suite, which he wrote in 1968 and or maybe 67, but, and I was saying to the artist that seeing that production, which is in this multi-million dollar theater in new Jersey, where they use visuals, they use Max Roach’s music, they had this poetry kind of thread throughout it, was an affirmation of everything that we were working on. So I kind of think about that as like, I call it “the Pan-African brain.” So there are all these ideas kind of swirling around, and you can just kind of reach into the brain, and you don’t even know that this thing exists in somewhere else in a totally different time period. Like I had never listened to Freedom Suite before. And so it was an affirmation that we were on the right track with this project. And so I think of that as kind of the way that I critique things now is, is sort of like, “am I on the path of this larger project?” And yeah, I really so I can it’s there is a kind of a critical lens to it in the sense of critique can include appreciation, but it’s, it’s veered away from where sometimes formal academy can go, which is like, “I’m going to break that idea down and tell you why my idea is better.” So so it’s moved away from that and just into that. “Oh, I can deeply appreciate that, because I understand the black tradition and I understand where this piece lives in the trajectory and where my piece lives in the trajectory and where they might be similar and where they might be different.”

That’s kind of the way creativity happens, I think. Like, I was reading about the way you come up with some of these ideas, for example, and very often they’re kind of rooted in the personal. [Pia: Right.] Where you are in a moment, what you noticed going on around you, and so, like, one of the things I wondered is, I mean, clearly the personal is this really rich space for creativity, for thinking, for resistance. Clearly you– some, like, amazing ideas have come out of it, right? At what point in your career were you comfortable with letting that be?

I’m thinking of my own experience here and how it took me a long time to like, bring the personal into my scholarship or to really just use “I,” and to kind of be vulnerable about certain things. It took me a long time to get there, but once I did, I found things opened up in this way I hadn’t expected. Did you find something similar? Did you have a similar experience? Or was the personal always there, accessible to you?

I think that’s an interesting question because I, I would say that in a lot of ways I’m personable, I’m not necessarily personal. So, I am very, like, genuinely cheerful and happy I would say 98% of the time [laughs], so that that is really like how I am. And I really just love everything about school. I, you know, is saying to my students that it’s sort of a miracle that someone could, like, do as much schooling as I have done and still want to be in school every single semester, right? [laughter] So, but I don’t– over time it’s probably shifted a little bit, but there are a lot of ways in which I felt vulnerable and in the ways in which I like, read very explicit advice, actually, like, I don’t know, in some higher ed thread about not being personal and not telling anyone anything about yourself ever pretty much that you thought might be a vulnerability, particularly if you’re on the tenure track.

And so, I understand why that advice exists. I would say it can be profound— my experience was that it was profoundly destructive over time. Because if you’re always kind of silencing yourself, that is its own difficult burden over a six year job interview, basically, which is the tenure track. [laughter] And that advice comes from, you know, a legitimate place where you if you’re in a meeting, you may say something that causes a flurry of feeling that you’re not even aware of, right? That you you might have said something quite innocently and and because it is a competitive environment, you don’t totally know how your words will kind of be used or ricochet or whatever. But I think to live in constant fear is also like not a way to live. Once I earned tenure, like I’ve– I made more, more clear decisions about, like, for instance, I took an administrative position at the same institution that I’ve been at this this whole time and I made a decision as I was taking that, I was having sort of an internal interview that I would make sure that everybody in that room knew that I was a lesbian and had a partner, so that would be the example.

So that was something that I had— I was out and every other part of my life, but I had gotten the advice to not be out on the job. And so that was a part that I would say, you know— hiding is sort of a weird thing. It’s more like I just never brought it up [laughs] like which is a form of hiding. And I, I just decided I could not live like that even for one more second. And so I made sure that when they brought me into this administrative position that they knew who I was and they knew who they were hiring into the position. And over time, I feel like those things have become, you know, strengths, you know, reasons why it’s important for me to be at certain tables. Even that, though, isn’t necessarily that I’m sharing deeply personally, it’s just sort of like, you know, your colleague might say that they’re married, right? [Lette: Right.] And you know, that they have a wife or husband and two kids or whatever. It’s like it’s a kind of natural office conversation. But when you feel like you’re a part of a vulnerable population, then you can sort of the I at least felt that I was encouraged to, to not share certain things. It– under sort of the idea that it was more professional to keep those things to myself. And, and when you’ve internalized— or when I internalized that kind of thing, it was a really deep internalization.

And so, I would say that I’m inspired a lot by my personal history. I don’t necessarily share a lot of it unless it has to do directly with education.

Yeah, thanks, thank you. [Pia: Yeah.] I’m thinking about similar advice I received about not sharing that I was a mother or a single parent on the job market. [Pia: Right.] And I think when people gave me this advice, I understood their reasons and it probably made a lot of sense, but at the same time, yeah, my, my first book is about maternity at the limits of academic discourse, so I didn’t I didn’t know how to separate it. [laughter]

The question, the next question I wanted to ask was about your love of the school, or love of schooling bcause I see it for sure in your work, but I also see, like, a discontent with the kind of bounds that go around the school, that go around the university. So you, you describe your podcast, for example, as a mobile and accessible university without walls. So what do you, what do you think of the the walls of a university? What do you think of these bounds?

I do think about them. Everything happens for me sort of organically, so I, I just adore, like, the boundaries of education. Like, I love bells, you know, [laughter] like when we had starting bells and ending bells, I love, you know, the start of the semester, the start of a school year, the end of a semester, the end of a school year… like, I love all of that. But it is— and it is true that I often find my inspiration outside of the walls and a great example of that is, I had gone to a gospel concert and I was looking at all of the teeny tiny gestures that I considered, like, part of the black tradition, you know? So like, if a person had like a special feather in their hat, or if they had like an especially sharp suit, or if they had like, a really nice matching handbag to the dress, to the coat, right? And I was just sort of in the audience kind of soaking that all in, both with the choirs that were coming up, but then also, with just the audience in general.

And then I started thinking about, like, there’s a way in which— so I’m at a historically black university, and there’s a way in which— and I teach black lit at this university, and yet, there is a way in which we all have these sort of social faces where we kind of cross the threshold into the classroom and we leave, I think, certain kinds of blackness outside of the classroom because it’s sort of seen as like, not the… not akin to the blackness that we’re studying and I just got kind of sad about that, like looking at all these little touches. So I designed an assignment where I had the students pick something in black culture that was meaningful to them, it could be anything, and then do some research around it and then bring it into the classroom as part of a project where they had to bring in a 3D object related to this research that they were in– of this item that they were interested in and then involve us in some kind of activity [laughs] related to all of this.

And I had a student who I had noticed seemed a little disconnected from school and may have even seemed like a little brusque? But, I didn’t take it personally, but she, but she sort of seemed like… just not kind of totally there at school for some reason, she seemed disconnected. And when we did this project, it turned out that while she was an undergrad—I think at this point she was a junior—but while she was either a freshman or a sophomore, her brother had been killed. And so—and her brother was her world and, he wasn’t the only sibling, but I think he was the only sibling who had passed away and it I didn’t know the details of it, but it sounded like, you know, wrong place, wrong time, and way too soon. He was in his 20s, I think. And so she did a whole project around… she was saying that was the only thing that she could think of to do this project on. And I really thought that was because it’s the only thing that she could think about, you know, like, how could you think about anything related to traditional school if that’s on your mind and you don’t have any place to put it?

And so, I suggested that she do a libation ceremony, which is, you know, a ritual where you, you pour water into a plant and you name all of the ancestors that you want to honor, and that she do research on that process, and then that she involve all, all of us in saying libations in whoever we wanted to say libations in and I, I felt like her energy in the class shifted after she did that, because there was no place to sort of put the contemporary black experience and that’s, you know, not the only version of it, but that’s one version, and there was no where to put it in my class, which was about black lit [laughter] until she had an opportunity to do an exercise like that with all of us. And I remember the session before we did the exercise, she sort of said spontaneously in the middle of class, “but what if I cry?” And I just turned to the class and said, “what do we do if we cry?” Right? Like, what, what do we have in the black tradition that can be a source of inspiration for how we might respond if someone cries, right? And, we’re a secular institution, but many of our students have gone to church and I just said, “have you know, have you gone to church before ever in your life? What like what kinds of things do you remember from those types of traditions?” And so we started talking about, you know, call and response. And she did indeed cry, you know, and we did indeed encourage her through call and response to continue with the presentation. And so it’s a really meaningful and beautiful moment in class and that’s kind of what I think about is, if we make everything purely academic in the traditional strictest sense, then we miss opportunities to connect our real lives, which are always already connected to academia, we just kind of need to find that pathway.

Yeah, that is strikingly beautiful. It’s one of the best things we can hope for, for the academic world, right? And the reason we do all this work is so that it can come together in this way… yeah…

I think while, while you’re thinking about that, what I will say is that I’m always interested in the ways in which we all are always already intellectual people and creative people and artistic people, and I think when you’re underrepresented, a lot of times, the story that we kind of get told about that is that that’s not true, [laugh] you know? and so these searches for meaning that I do outside of the university are just about those moments that kind of catch my attention. When I was at the gospel concert, it was partially about seeing beauty in all of these millions of gestures that I know are just so inherent in black culture, but then don’t have a way to really be celebrated in the Academy necessarily unless we draw additional attention to them. And so that was how I came up with that assignment.

And I was saying to the students at one point that if you’re an academic, an intellectual, like everywhere you go, things are kind of catching your attention and you’re thinking about them deeply. And I just really appreciate that opportunity when I’m walking around the world, to be able to do that. And, and I think, you know, my regular life and my friends, of course, know that I’m an academic, but when I’m just, like, at the grocery store, people don’t necessarily [laughter] know that. And so I really enjoy kind of being like, you know, an incognito academic and walking around the world and then kind of noticing things that can be brought to the university or where the university can be brought to the world, so.

Yes, thank you. I see we are close to running out of time. I would love to spend a few minutes talking about Ratoon, if you don’t mind, and and how that came together, because it seems to bring together everything that matters to you. Well, a lot of what matters to you. So, you had these three artists working together… could you tell us a little bit more about about how they worked together and what was the end result?

So this was just this is such a great origin story that I alluded to a little bit earlier, but, I mean, Sasha just wrote me out of the blue, out of the clear blue [laughter] and said, “I have this project,” and as soon as she described it, I was like, “I’m in. I want to bring this.” And so, she lives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and then travels a lot from there and so she came down, for a, for a half a day, and we kind of walked around the campus and looked at different places where she could exhibit her work. That was the original idea. And she knew for sure that she wanted to exhibit in the library and, I had– so, I had passed— somewhere in this process of her coming to visit and us deciding on the library and her kind of wanting it to be that students would kind of be in the library and be able to connect books to the various photos, I had passed a poster from the Pan-Africana Student Union and it had a quote by Zora Neale Hurston at the top and a picture of Black Panther women underneath. And I had already been in conversation with Yolanda at some point to, she was—Yolanda Wisher, the poet—was thinking about coming to Lincoln to teach a semester long class and then we ultimately didn’t go in that direction because it’s just a really long commute and so with all of the other things she had on her plate, that didn’t seem as feasible. So Zora Neale Hurston was kind of already in my mind, so when I saw that photo and the Zora Neale Hurston quote, I thought: “foremothers and daughters, and that’s the larger series that I’m going to bring Sasha underneath.”

And so then that, I think, was how I got the idea to connect Sasha and Yolanda, and then it seemed natural to bring someone in who could do musical composition, so that was Sumi Tonooka. And so, that was the original kind of— But it was very kind of organic, like passing a poster was like, [laughter] here’s how we can kind of… So I think, again, with the Pan-African brain, like in one version, there’s a whole class in it that was not necessarily devoted entirely to Zora Neale Hurston, but Yolanda’s idea was to start with Hurston. And so then that kind of got, you know, re, like, remixed into this idea of celebrating Hurston because, Sasha Phyars-Burgess travels all over the world and I felt like Zora Neale Hurston set precedent for that as an anthropologist, as an ethnographer, and traveling to some of the same places that Sasha was going to. So, that sort of set the larger trajectory.

So then we started meeting, and Yolanda Wisher and I completed an MBA degree together at Temple that was very avant garde and, really celebrated the avant garde and primarily focused on the, I would say, the white mainstream avant garde. And we were always kind of looking for who are the underrepresented voices in that. And so it was just a really beautiful, kind of full circle moment.

And so she came in to do writing workshops and what came out organically for her was she had the students respond to a bunch of Sasha’s photos as part of the writing exercises, and then ultimately decided that it made the most sense to only use the students words for the poem. And because we’re in this avant garde school of poetics, she knew how to curate and cultivate that in such a way that she’s using all of these disparate lines, but they make sense when they’re all fuzed together, even though it’s not a linear narrative.

And then we handed that piece over to Sumi, and she chose certain lines that the students had come up with to create the lyrics around. And so she wrote, three— one songs is original, but she had already had that kind of in her portfolio so that she used, that could teach the students about jazz improv improvization. And then the other three songs, she used specific lyrics from the student poem to create, and then we just— you know what the funny thing about this whole thing is that we were basically all working kind of in silos. Like, I was sort of holding a larger vision for how this might come together, but we weren’t collaborating… like, it wasn’t like we were all sitting down at the table and saying, “what do we want to do?” Right? So each person kind of took a piece of the scarf and they did their sort of portion of it, and then we put it all together and it worked [laughter]. But we didn’t really, really, really know that it was going to work.

We had initially the idea was that we would do, you know, a traditional, like if we had a performing arts school, we would do like, I don’t know, a week of rehearsals at minimum, at least several weeks of rehearsals. and because we’re so, we’re rural and we’re far away from, you know, where everybody else was, it became clear that we would do one night of rehearsal, so we did one dress rehearsal the night before we did the final performance, and it worked [laughs].

Now I had full confidence that it was going to work [laughs], because I think that’s what you get when you have master artists working on their part of the scarf, right? But we didn’t truly know was it all going to flow together, and it just worked seamlessly. And part of it was because we have a choir director that was willing to rehearse the choir. So we have a 58 person concert choir, and Sumi had actually never written music for voices before, but she was really excited to do it. And so, she wrote it and then that choir’s director, Director Victoria Pitre, she rehearsed the choir, and that was part of what made it feasible. And so they are kind of a centerpiece and then they almost are their, their own kind of set piece. Because it’s not a play, so we didn’t have a traditional set, it’s not, there’s not characters, there’s not people acting, but we had three students who vocalized the, the poem and then we had the 58 person choir that sang the different songs, and then we took, we have someone on campus who I call the projection artist, who has a different job on campus, but he has a side project where he takes historic photographs and projects some large scale on historic buildings. And so he worked with us to take Sasha’s photos and project them large scale onto the black box theater walls and so then all of this was, basically going on more or less simultaneously. And so that’s what composes the entire piece of Ratoon

Sounds like so much fun.

It was great.

Yeah, and look what you did [laughs]. It’s amazing.

Part of what was so great about it was that, you know, even though when I took this position, I really made a concerted effort to put anxiety to the side, right. But I can still kind of run a little bit anxious. And so what was really great about this is that for some reason, I was incredibly calm, I mean, the entire time, right? So I could hold the vision and hold the calm. And I think that’s what curation allows you to do, is that I knew that everyone that I had chosen was exceptionally good at their jobs, and so they did not need me to do anything but be reassuring, hold the vision, and I just I would repeat a lot, like in our meetings, like “we have everything that we need.” Right? “I know that we have everything that we need, we don’t need to, you know, find additional things because we don’t think it’s good enough. I think we have everything that we need already.” And so because of that, then we were able to really center the students as a core part of the the piece. And that was really, you know, Yolanda’s initial idea. And, and that really worked well. And then the choir was such a it’s it’s so powerful to have 50 voices on stage, saying words that other students have written. And then what I also liked about it was that the words by the students, we don’t know who those students— I mean, we have a sense of, you know, we have an archive of everybody who submitted stuff, but, but you can’t look at any single line. And so there’s a kind of— and connected to a particular student. So, there’s a kind of universality to the black experience that came from the individual lines that meant something to an individual, but then sound, had a deeper resonance, when we say them in a way that’s not connected to an individual.

And I see, like, there’s this language coming up that describes what you do and affirms what you do, so we have curation, holding the space, because I think naming things, is such a, is like part of the affirmation, right? And part of when we imagine ways to do things, if we can name them. It’s like, it helps us.

Yeah, I was going to add to that. I think as we were talking, like, what’s been really generative for me is to think about that I, I did somehow for myself without really realizing it, create a vocabulary that makes sense to me in terms of how I want to be in the Academy. And I don’t have all of the words to name all the individual pieces of what it is that I might bring, but I really like thinking about, you know, that one way to be is competitive and then there’s another way that you could be if you knew how to name it, which is like collaborative [laughter]. And I and I really like thinking of them, you know, not necessarily as oppositional or that I’m going up against anything, but just as, as this kind of network of pathways and I get to select and help my students select ways that feel better to me than maybe some of the ways that I was trained that just did not, were not necessarily a good fit for me personally, or stresses me out more than I wanted to be stressed out, or gave me more anxiety than I wanted to be anxious. And I will say that we’re launching our next projects called No Archives, No Black Studies and so we’re doing a lot of work around like collaboration and invitation and how to invite students into the archives in ways that are meaningful to them and working with the whole slew of faculty to do that. So, it’ll be great for me to kind of go into this next year thinking about, like, if I were adding more vocabulary to this alternative or additional way of being in the academy, what would what would those words include? And I think as any professional, you know, we have all these things that we kind of do organically that are just inherent in how we do things and I think it is so powerful to name them and then put statements and words to them to really make them visible and legible so that other people, if they choose to, could also follow that path or add to it or enhance it in their own way.

Thank you Pia Deas for coming on to many academies. Thank you to the Aydelotte Foundation for your support. Thank you to Jodi Reddick’s for your arts and to Sebastian Bauer for your music. Thank you for listening.