Richard Douglass-Chin specializes in American and postcolonial literature, especially African American and Asian American writing. He has published articles in MELUS (“Finding the Way: Chuang Hua’s Crossings and Chinese Literary Tradition”); and the Canadian Review of American Studies (“Liberia as American Diaspora: The Transnational Scope of American Identity in the Mid-Nineteenth Century”). His critical text, Preacher Woman Sings the Blues, he investigates the literary connections between contemporary African American authors and their eighteenth and nineteenth-century predecessors. His examination of the important influence of Asian and African literary and philosophical traditions on American transcendentalism, modernism and postmodernism has taken him to Africa, the Caribbean, and the Yale-China Institute of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has been a featured speaker at Isaac Royall House and Slave quarters in Medford, Massachusetts, where he presented his ongoing research on one of the first extant records of African American women’s experience in writing-
- the 1783 reparations petition of Belinda Royall/Sutton to the Massachusetts Legislature. His short story “Blood Guitar,” about the integral influence of West African art on Picasso’s cubism and modernism in general, was published in The African American Review in 2015 and his article “Madness and Translation of the Bones in NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!” appears in Madness in Black Women’s Diasporic Fictions:
Aesthetics of Resistance (2017).
Douglass-Chin’s scholarship will center on bringing the rich history and texture of global oratures, literatures, and epistemologies to the Humanities, in order to produce among his students a truly globally competent citizenry. As a scholar in English Literature with a speciality in Asian, African, and Postcolonial American forms, Douglass-Chin has been continuously aware of the dearth in the Humanities of willingness, faculty and curriculum to deal competently with race, racialization, and the importance of African, Asian, and Indigenous epistemologies to global civilization—for example the profound influence of West African art upon Picasso’s Cubism specifically, and modernism in general; or China’s invention of paper, printing, and the scholarly examination system; or Haudenosaunee systems of democratic government adopted by the USA. “Despite the world’s diversity. . . [the curriculum] is overwhelmingly White, male, and Eurocentric” (Henry et. al., The Equity Myth, 2017; p. 280; also, Grosfoguel,2010).
Lana Parker , Education
Lana Parker is an Assistant Professor of Education at the University of Windsor. She writes about the influence of politics on educational policy and discourse, and about the possibilities for ethically informed pedagogy. She is interested in the relationship between education and democracy, and particularly what constitutes responsibility and goodness. In her current project, she is investigating the implications of the post-truth era in education, looking at how students navigate meaning and make decisions about information. Lana was a newcomer to Canada and a facet of her research is informed by her experiences as a racialized student and, now, academic in neoliberal institutions.
Are We Human? When the Call to Responsibility is Complicated by Race and Geography
Working with philosophers whose thought is located squarely in the Eurocentric tradition can present lacunae for scholars grappling with neocolonial contexts and racial embodiment. In this chapter, I investigate how one particular scholar, Emmanuel Levinas, presents both an opportunity for an ethical phenomenology and a conflict for scholars who are grappling with the essential question of what it means to be “other.” I begin with an overview of Levinasian ethics, including perspectives on pre-ontological responsibility and alterity. I then discuss some of the difficulties his thought presents for a neocolonial and racialized contexts turning to work from Drabinski, Anderson, and Bhabha; I also put these tensions into context with my own narratives of identity, education, and scholarship as a racialized scholar and teacher. Finally, I argue that Levinasian conceptions of responsibility can still provide a way