In fall 1970, Njoki McElroy taught the first university-level “Interpretation of Black Drama” course in the United States, which she designed and offered as a graduate student earning her doctorate in the Department of Interpretation at Northwestern University (NU). Her course curricularized epistemic commitments and selections from the Black Arts Movement (BAM) repertoire, bringing its theoretico-aesthetic project and its plays to a unit that was trying to reimagine itself beyond performance conventions resembling those of nineteenth-century platform reading and a pernicious lacuna in its analytical infrastructure. By braiding BAM commitments and texts together with the practices and purposes of oral interpretation in her teaching, McElroy expanded the “intellectual geographies”Footnote 1 of the former to include the classroom and the intellectual genealogies of the latter into what would ultimately become performance studies.
This was a tumultuous time on McElroy’s campus and nationally, defined by intense Black Power, anticolonial, feminist, and anti–Vietnam War activism, and the stakes were high. Universities were key sites in these systemic struggles over the future of the hegemonic US liberal norm in the immediate post–civil rights era.Footnote 2 Would that norm, and the myriad subsidiary institutional investments subtending it, perpetuate its putative color blindness, thereby de facto ensuring the continued structural supremacy of its white, heteronormative, propertied male default or, in the words of American Studies scholar Roderick Ferguson, would these activist movements succeed in introducing “new political orders within all spheres of American society … forcing institutions that snubbed time and alteration to wake up and see that things could change”?Footnote 3 The humanities in US universities were both such subtending enterprises and microcosms of these larger dynamics: still justifying their work and worth using the universalizing and “power-evasive” rhetoricFootnote 4 that had persisted since the 1930s even as the race‑, ethnic‑, and gender-based rights revolutions of the time were pressing for radical reorganizations of their core projects beyond new iterations of the politics of representation.
McElroy’s Northwestern course offered just such a reorganization. In addition to texts from the emerging canon of BAM drama, it included Black nationalist and revolutionary postcolonial thinkers in the syllabus and drew upon both classroom and community performance initiatives to mobilize the “critical possibilities” of Black literature.Footnote 5 Her repudiation of interp’s historic commitment to the New Criticism as its default methodology, and her centering of performance in its own right rather than its subordination to literature, anticipated the core commitments of performance studies. Further, her approach included theory-driven critique, rigorous historicizing, and situating Black drama in its political-economic contexts: practices antithetical to oral interpretation in this period but intrinsic to the performance studies to come. Her course—later expanded to three by student demand—outlasted oral interpretation as a university discipline by twenty years, providing the earliest intellectual precursor to performance studies in its current form that this odd and obsolete field had.
This essay argues for Njoki McElroy (1925–2023) as an underrecognized, visionary forebear of performance studies by detailing her pedagogical work in and for the oral interpretation of literature in the early 1970s, decentering what performance studies scholar Joshua Chambers-Letson has termed the field’s “white fathers” narrative.Footnote 6 It is both a genealogical and a recovery project, but not only that. As gender studies scholar Brittney Cooper reminds us, the “recovery imperative memorializes Black women [intellectuals] … while obscuring other kinds of critical scholarly utility they have for our conversations in history, politics, literary studies, … feminist theory,” and theatre and performance studies.Footnote 7 In this spirit, attention to McElroy’s pioneering work also highlights the significance of course design and teaching as radical performance-based projects in their own rights, which, with some notable exceptions, remain underexamined in genealogies of the field.Footnote 8 In Black Patience, theatre scholar Julius B. Fleming, Jr. affirms that “black radicalism is an exercise in revamping the boundaries of the norm. It entails a self-conscious commitment to reconstituting, editing, and transferring knowledges and materials that are relevant to the lives of African-descended peoples”:Footnote 9 precisely what McElroy did when she drew on her BAM commitments to create “The Interpretation of Black Drama” from within the small, staid field of oral interpretation at her predominantly white institution (PWI). Close analysis of her course illuminates the ways BAM theatre and drama outside of coastal metropoles circulated in university humanities classrooms as partner repertoires to professional and community stages during the pivotal period of the early 1970s: a performance-based example of cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter’s reminder that Black Studies was “inseparable from the parallel emergence of the Black Aesthetic/Black Arts movements and the central reinforcing relationship that had come to exist between them.”Footnote 10 A focus on McElroy’s radical oral interpretation pedagogy deepens our understanding of the ways activist movements revolutionized university curricula, contributing to studies of higher education in this period that emphasize the establishment of identity-focused units over intradepartmental interventions. In so doing, it also contributes to accounts of the emergence of a Black Radical Tradition in education, and centers performance-based academic disciplines, which are neglected in these studies.Footnote 11 Further, it expands histories of these disciplines that underexamine both the 1970s and its radical teachers, including analyses of oral interpretation—which, with two notable exceptions, ignore both McElroy’s contributions and the epistemic and institutional upheavals of the 1970s.Footnote 12 Finally, examining these contributions in the context of then-dominant arguments for oral interpretation’s work and worth provides a uniquely performance-centered perspective on the gaps between what the midcentury humanities routinely claimed they did and what they actually could do in the classroom during a fraught period.Footnote 13
The essay’s archive includes McElroy’s publications, materials from Northwestern’s Department of Oral Interpretation, and primary and secondary literatures detailing the BAM’s epistemic and aesthetic commitments. As the interdisciplinary editors of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women, remind us, “black women’s intellectual histories can never be explained by way of a mere genealogy of ideas.”Footnote 14 Therefore the essay also examines multigenerational networks of interlocutors and relationships that shaped and illuminate her contributions. These include her family and two of her Chicago activist contemporaries who played pivotal roles in the BAM—theatre maker Val Gray Ward and influential editor Hoyt Fuller—as well as her white department chair, advocate, and colleague, Wallace A. Bacon. It engages her published account of her teaching using an expanded repertoire of works by Bryant Keith Alexander, D. Soyini Madison, and Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, performance studies scholars from the interpretation tradition in successive generations following McElroy.
The essay’s conceptual frame relies on the mutually reinforcing works of literary scholars Koritha Mitchell and Kevin Quashie to amplify elements of McElroy’s creative and pedagogical strategies. In From Slave Cabins to the White House, Mitchell challenges the persistent view that self-affirmation and acknowledgment of white supremacist violence operate as mutually exclusive trajectories in works of Black cultural production. In contrast, she asserts, “as a cultural project that African Americans engage in, the tendency to pursue success while acknowledging hostility is an endeavor of articulation and performance that does not assume stable identity so much as discussion and debate, as well as both harmony and discord in action.”Footnote 15 McElroy’s archive attests to the truth of Mitchell’s argument. From her positions as a culture worker-artist-scholar-professor, she challenged the separation of campus from community, insisting on the latter’s performances as pedagogically invaluable. In the process, she dissolved the false dichotomy of interp versus acting that defined her field. In her classroom she initiated, then managed, vigorous cross-racial discussions while refusing expectations that she minimize student discomfort. She was candid about the epistemic erasure against which she was intervening by offering “The Interpretation of Black Drama,” framing it explicitly as a pedagogical challenge.
Combining ethnocentric teacher attitude with racist educational materials, World Drama or American Drama courses often ignore the multiplicity of cultural experiences… . Hence, as instructor of the class, I had the formidable task of helping students understand Black literature while knowing they could articulate little or nothing about the distinct aesthetic experiences of Black people.Footnote 16
She was equally candid about her success at this formidable task in this same article. At the conclusion of her course, “students who argued earlier in generalities or not at all could now articulate specific aspects of the Black aesthetic experience.”Footnote 17
McElroy’s braiding together of self-affirmation with the acknowledgment of structural racism, as well as her management of both “harmony and discord” in her classroom, demonstrate the “quiet” Quashie theorizes as “a shift in how we commonly understand blackness, which is often described as expressive, dramatic, or loud.”Footnote 18 Quiet, in this context, “is an exquisite balance of what is public and what is intimate”: the capacity to operate at the “crosshairs of publicness” with “a consciousness that exists beyond the expectation of resistance.”Footnote 19 Njoki McElroy operated at these very crosshairs. She was the first—and for decades, only—Black faculty member in her unit, handling all the very public institutional labors demanded of such “firsts” in the post–civil rights moment: “the One”Footnote 20 responsible for designing and teaching pioneering courses focused on the interpretation of Black literature. The eyes of her department faculty, the university, and her students were upon her. The results of her teaching were literally public: annual group performances by her students, which she directed.Footnote 21 The success of her efforts had implications for her academic career, the potential future place of Black literature in her department and, likely, in the School of Speech in which it was housed, and for the Black student activists who fought hard for Black studies and performance opportunities on campus, including for more of her classes. As the next section of the essay explains, the infrastructure she brought to this high-stakes academic publicness was forged in the most intimate of spaces: her homes, first that of her birth and, later, in her own for her and with her children. McElroy’s quiet was not silent but, as the subsequent sections of the essay show, it was strategic. “Quiet is faith,” Quashie writes, “in that it can embrace what there is little evidence of.”Footnote 22 McElroy’s course was an affirmation of her faith in performance as a mode of Black intellectual production, in oral interpretation, and in the classroom as a BAM “alternative stage.”Footnote 23
The essay begins by introducing readers to Njoki McElroy, to the immediate Chicago BAM and campus contexts that birthed her pathbreaking course, and to the dominant approach to oral interpretation of literature advanced by her chair, Wallace Bacon. It then turns to the course itself, analyzing McElroy’s conceptual framing and course readings as radical and prescient interventions into that approach and reflecting on her routine pedagogical challenges.
Reading Aloud in Turbulent Times
Njoki McElroy’s Black Journey
Njoki McElroy (1925–2023) did not seek out an academic home in the oral interpretation of literature as practiced in a PWI. It found her. She was already an accomplished educator, director, and performer before she joined the Department of Interpretation at Northwestern as a graduate student. She was born Hilda Nadine Hampton into a loving and prominent family in Sherman, Texas, site of a lynching and white riot that burned the town’s Black businesses to the ground when she was five years old. Her account of this atrocity in her memoir exemplifies her deployment of quiet in Quashie’s use of the term. It appears midway through the book, her interiority remains opaque to the reader and, in a move that reaffirms Mitchell’s assertion of paired affirmation and acknowledgment, she then focuses extensively and tenderly on her nurturing family home, a “storybook beautiful … big Victorian.”Footnote 24 The home’s address, 1012 Natchez, serves as the memoir’s title. It was an anchor for her in challenging times, as in bell hooks’s words about her own homeplace: “there we learned to have faith.”Footnote 25 This home incubated McElroy’s enduring investment in storytelling as a mode of consolidating community while also highlighting individual creativity. She shared in an interview with E. Patrick Johnson, Professor of Performance Studies and Dean of the School of Communication at Northwestern, that she became a storyteller at the age of two, nurtured by both her mother—“a great storyteller”—and by the neighborhood gatherings on the porch of 1012 Natchez where the stories flowed.Footnote 26
McElroy was raised in the segregated suburbs of Dallas. Her present for graduating from Xavier University in New Orleans, which she entered at sixteen, was a trip to Chicago, where she applied to graduate programs and met her future husband, Clenan “Mac” McElroy, who had been a Tuskegee Airman. When Mac was hired to teach math at Great Lakes Naval Base, they moved their young family to North Chicago, and Njoki taught in the local public schools. It was their first move into an integrated community.Footnote 27 As she explained in her memoir, “Recognizing a need for my children and other black students to realize their talents and learn their black history [given the failures of local public schools], I organized a cultural/artistic workshop in our home.”Footnote 28 This became the Cultural Workshop of North Chicago, a survey of Black history, literature, and culture presented in performances by local teenagers under McElroy’s direction. The Workshop was a valuable resource in multiple respects: touring schools, community centers, and universities in the region; raising funds for college scholarships; and developing student poets and playwrights. McElroy enlarged its reach by publishing Black Journey: A Black American Review,Footnote 29 which functioned as both a collection of dramatic monologues and as a critical humanities anthology of ideas. Chapters focused on artists (Phyllis Wheatley, Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson) politicians, entrepreneurs (Madame C. J. Walker), as well as Black Nationalist leaders including Malcom X, Elijah Muhammad, and Stokely Carmichael (“Kwame Toure” [sic]). Some of these same thinkers would also appear on her “Interpretation of Black Drama” syllabus.
The Cultural Workshop was one of several Chicago area performance-based projects arising directly from or congruently with Chicago’s Black Arts Movement between 1965 and the mid-1970s. As James Edward Smethurst explains in The Black Arts Movement, the city was a hub of the BAM, both regionally and nationally, noting, “Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the Black Arts movement in Chicago is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to pick out a dominant artistic genre,” with drama as important as poetry.Footnote 30 Notable Chicago BAM drama initiatives included Val Gray Ward’s Kuumba Theatre Workshop, founded in 1969. and Abena Brown’s collective, ETA Creative Arts Foundation, founded in 1971. McElroy was connected with Ward and Kuumba; D. Soyini Madison, herself a member of Kuumba in this period, recalls learning about McElroy from Ward well before meeting her in the Northwestern University department they would ultimately share.Footnote 31 McElroy likely knew Brown as well through her connection to Hoyt Fuller, a central figure in the BAM cultural program, its Chicago performance initiatives, and her own career.
Fuller, editor of the Chicago-based Negro Digest, later renamed Black World Magazine, was one of the BAM’s “most influential and unique luminaries,” according to African American Studies scholar Jonathan Fenderson.Footnote 32 Under his leadership, the magazine was a powerful vehicle for its vision and goals. He founded his own arts collective, Chicago’s Organization of Black American Culture, in 1967; it included a drama workshop lead by Ann Smith, who was teaching at Northeastern Illinois College at the time. Smith’s workshop produced BAM plays in schools and community centers and collaborated with both Kuumba and ETA.
Fuller was himself a professor at Northwestern during 1969–71, overlapping with McElroy’s time as a graduate student and her initial offering of “The Interpretation of Black Drama,” and she thanks him in her dissertation acknowledgments. These are all indicators that she did not simply curricularize BAM ideas in the abstract but did so from within a robust network of relationships to its local and national leaders. Significantly, Fuller heartily endorsed her Cultural Workshop, writing in his “Introduction” to Black Journey that it brought “Black Consciousness” to North Chicago.Footnote 33 His use of “Black Consciousness” in this endorsement is noteworthy both as a way to periodize the movement’s post–civil rights era intellectual project and as an indicator of the political-aesthetic program central to its performance projects. As Ward and her journalist husband Francis wrote in 1971:
The current phase of the black liberation struggle, this newest Black Power-Black Consciousness stage, successor to the old civil rights movement, is, without a doubt, the most profound and meaningful period of this century for black Americans. No period has produced such sustained political and social militancy among blacks; no period has been such a significant break with the old, stereotyped, white-oriented past; no period has so emphatically validated our glorious African past, as well as our cultural and racial beauty and lifestyles. And no previous period has held such uncertainty for the black future.Footnote 34
The Black artist had a central role in actively contributing to the struggle and addressing these existential concerns, and with that role came obligations. The first of these required repudiating “the false notion that an artist is an artist, no matter what his [sic] color,” along with the active assertion of Blackness centered in Africanist aesthetics: “To the extent that any black artist hides from or denies his [sic] African or African-American roots, his courage, honesty and dignity as an artist suffer.”Footnote 35 By endorsing McElroy’s Cultural Workshop as a vector for Black Consciousness, Fuller was effectively both situating and affirming her work within the overlapping revolutionary commitments of Africanist aesthetics and Black Nationalist projects, including his own, within the BAM.
As McElroy was beginning her graduate school career, Black Consciousness was also coming to Northwestern, though not without struggle. On 3 May 1968, a month after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, more than a hundred Black students took over the University Bursar’s Office, declaring it “Closed for business ’til racism at NU is ended.”Footnote 36 The occupation arose from the university’s inadequate response to a previous set of demands—including acknowledgment of institutional racism on campus, an increase in admissions of Black students, affinity housing, adding Black Studies courses to the curriculum, and hiring Black professors—and ended following negotiations with the administration.Footnote 37 Campus activism connecting Black struggles to anticolonial struggles continued over the next decade, led by some of the student activists involved in the building takeover. In 1972, two years after McElroy first offered her pioneering course, Northwestern established its Department of Black Studies, in response to the Black students’ activism four years before.
The conjuncture of this cresting Black activism at NU, the robustness of BAM performance initiatives in Chicago, and the increasing visibility of McElroy’s Cultural Workshop ultimately brought her to Northwestern. She writes, “Through one of our Black History productions, Richard Willis, a professor in the Theatre Department at Northwestern University, became a supporter of our activities.”Footnote 38 Willis ultimately recruited McElroy to the university, where she entered the M.A. program in the Department of Interpretation. As she explained in an interview with Paul Edwards, Willis encouraged her to do her graduate work in interp over theatre because “Her ambition to investigate performance as a community-based teaching tool ‘would be accepted better’” there.Footnote 39 She brought the Workshop’s and BAM’s commitments to critical political consciousness and Africanist aesthetics with her, and stayed on for the Ph.D., graduating with her doctorate in interpretation in 1973. While conducting fieldwork for her dissertation, “Traditional Wit and Humor in Pan-Afrikan Drama,” she was given the name “Njoki” (“the one who came back”) by novelist and performance theorist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, whom she interviewed in Kenya in 1972.Footnote 40 During her graduate work, she raised six children and cofounded the beauty business Black Fox Enterprises with Mac, assuming presidency of the company after his death in 1978, and continued teaching and directing productions in the department at Northwestern for more than thirty years.
Oral Interpretation and the Contingencies of “Communion”
One of McElroy’s Interp graduate student contemporaries and, later, colleagues, director Frank Galati (1943–2023), described the oral interpretation of literature with sardonic affection as “reading aloud”: a characterization that points to some of its peculiarities.Footnote 41 Interpretation trained students in the close analysis of literature—the better to produce informed, generally but not always solo, performances of these works, much as a dancer would interpret choreography or a singer a score.Footnote 42 Unlike these artists, though, illuminating the literature was the interpreter’s primary goal, not the performance itself; it was not “acting”—a devil term in the field. Interp was a derivative discipline with no unique object to call its own: literary, but not quite English, and performance-y, but not quite theatre. Its performance conventions included using a lectern as the principal staging vehicle and offering solo renditions of multicharacter prose and drama, which might include turning one’s head back and forth to represent the loci of different addressees in the texts.Footnote 43 Interp drew its analytical methods from literary study, in this period primarily if uneasily from midcentury New Criticism (NC): briefly put, a formalist strategy positing the literary work, and the poem in particular, as a self-contained whole that must be examined independently from particulars of the author’s biography, the context in which it was produced, or its effects on readers.Footnote 44 As this essay details, by the early 1970s, this was a problem.
The oral interpretation of literature that defined McElroy’s departmental home occupied an odd and equivocal position at Northwestern. As a field, it was both respected—given its founding position in its “School of Oratory” (later “School of Speech,” now “School of Communication”)—and chronically epistemically insecure. Though a full history of the field, including its Northwestern iteration, both exceeds the scope of this essay and is detailed elsewhere, a brief overview is useful for understanding this contradictory status.Footnote 45 Interpretation entered the academy by way of elocution, the British and, later, American practice and pedagogy of platform presentation popular from the mid-eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Elocutionists might instruct students in the “appropriate” management of voice and gesture; they might also deliver solo renditions of literature in readings from a podium—hence “platform”—a more respectable form of performance-based entertainment than the theatre. As performance studies scholar Bruce Henderson explains in his history of embodiment in the field, by the late 1930s, administrators in the school that elocution built felt impelled to “improve the academic respectability of a program that had clung too firmly to its roots” in this tradition.Footnote 46 Bacon, a Shakespeare scholar with a Ph.D. in English, was hired to chair the department in 1947 to implement this charge. Northwestern was unique in having a stand-alone Department of Interpretation that offered its own bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees. Its status as a graduate degree-granting unit, Bacon’s august intellectual reputation, and the fact that it housed not one but three field-defining figures—Bacon, his contemporary and prolific textbook author Charlotte Lee, and chamber theatre founder Robert Breen—gave its programs especially venerable status, though it was not unique in its approach to the field. When McElroy joined the department, interpretation’s status in graduate education seemed promising. The 1969–70 Speech Communication Association’s (SCA’s) Directory of Graduate Programs in Speech, the typical disciplinary location for interp courses and degrees, listed seventy-nine institutions offering M.A.’s and/or Ph.D.’s in the field, though most were areas of emphasis within larger umbrella units.Footnote 47 But this seeming robustness belied a deeper reality that the field’s theoretical and methodological gaps rendered it unsustainable if it did not innovate beyond its 1970s practices, and so it proved. By 1984, the department had changed its name to “Performance Studies”—the second unit in the United States, after New York University, to adopt the designation—though “interpretation” persisted in course titles in the unit.Footnote 48 Interestingly, though McElroy’s teaching is the primary focus of this analysis, her fieldwork-based dissertation exemplified the ethnographic trajectory in performance studies a decade before the best known through the work of her NU colleague Dwight Conquergood and the anthropologist Victor Turner. Eventually, interpretation as a university discipline in its own right withered away in the shadow of its successor formation at Northwestern, in other US colleges and universities, and in professional organizations, persisting only in names for categories of competitive speaking events in high school and college forensics.
Reducing interpretation to “reading aloud” was anathema to the midcentury luminaries of the field, and especially to Bacon (1914–2001), arguably interp’s best-known intellectual during the more than thirty years he chaired the NU department (1947–79). He vigorously and consistently argued that interpretation was far more than the analysis of literature, more than a genre of performance, more even than an amalgam of the two. In the final paragraphs of a short paper, “Reverberation: An Ontological View of Interpretation,” published in 1968, he asserted a legitimating vision of the field that persisted through the 1970s:
It is not a question of “criticism or performance,” “understanding or reading”; all the real questions [central to the field] involve as much interest in both of these sides as one can possibly manage, doubtless, but what we must really learn is the way in which life dissolves into life, lives into lives, as the interpreter really learns to interpret, as he [sic] really learns what it means to become a poem.
I take this to be the center of our subject—this, not criticism, not systematic knowledge, not communication to an audience. This.Footnote 49
In the second edition (1972) of his widely adopted textbook The Art of Interpretation, Bacon described the field’s ultimate purpose and goal—this intersubjective dissolution of lives into lives and the interpreter into the poem—as “communion.”Footnote 50 He was utterly, unflaggingly sincere in this conviction. For him, interpretation was sacramental. As his theorizing of interp’s ontology developed over the 1970s, he clarified that this communion included both the vicarious experience of an individual reader immersed in a text, as in Wallace Stevens’s line “the reader became the book” from his poem “The House Was Quiet and the World was Calm”—which prefaced all editions of Bacon’s The Art of Interpretation—and the potential for transmuting this immersion into a socially salutary connection between literature and actual lives when catalyzed by live performance.
This legitimation of the field was unique neither to Bacon nor to Northwestern, though he was especially influential and vigorous in promoting it. Indeed, it was not unique to interpretation. Bacon’s faith in interp’s potential to generate communion was derived from a larger creed in which he was deeply invested: legitimations of the humanities in US universities since the 1930s that emphasized the personal development of the liberal citizen subject while leaving both the historical specificity and contingency of such subjects and the actual mechanisms of this development strategically vague. These legitimations deployed a standard rhetorical repertoire for asserting the humanities’ social goods, including (in Bacon’s words, which are representative) “the responsibility of the arts [which he situated firmly in the humanities] to liberalize,” their juxtaposition against the approaches and methods of the sciences, their putatively intrinsically democratic nature, and the conviction that “[t]he humanities are concerned with the question of what makes life worth living. And that question concerns not simply oneself but others. The humanities must help us learn who we are; they must help us learn the otherness of others.”Footnote 51 By the 1970s, though, the revolutionary activisms of BAM and Northwestern students, coupled with the rising corporatization of and hyperspecialization within the academy, made Bacon’s legitimation of interp using midcentury characterizations of the humanities seem less like a sturdy anchor for a chronically insecure field and more like a quaint path to irrelevance. The contours of the liberal “we,” “us,” and “others” were being actively contested on campus. New disciplines were being birthed, the prestige and resource base of the sciences and other more legibly instrumentalizable disciplines was increasing, and it was not clear exactly how interp—and by extension, the humanities—actually did what it said it did. Interp badly needed a powerful and thickly theorized account of its work in the world; that it was still tethered to the New Criticism and subordinated performance practice as a mere tool were structural impediments to its developing one. McElroy’s course addressed all of these issues, in the process anticipating performance studies by a decade.
The Interpretation of Black Drama as Radical Performance
Bacon was McElroy’s department chair and a member of her dissertation committee. He was an enthusiastic advocate of her courses, as evidenced by his archival materials, which include letter after letter to his dean arguing for support for more of them.Footnote 52 McElroy praised him for his openness to her work, especially her innovative performances, telling Edwards he “made me feel I could really go without being all bound up in tradition.”Footnote 53 Further, Bacon was neither oblivious to the profound shortfalls of the colorblind metaphysics underpinning the rationales for both interpretation and the humanities that he strategically deployed, nor was he naive about their real-world implications in the interp classroom.Footnote 54 Both Bacon and McElroy were true believers in the transformative power of analyzing and performing literature. Even so, as McElroy herself acknowledged in a quote from the preceding section, the labors of deploying interp as a vehicle for learning the “otherness of others” rebounded very differently to a faculty member who was both “other” in her heretofore all-white unit and teaching material systemically othered within the literary canon of the time.Footnote 55 McElroy named these dynamics in the opening paragraphs of her article about the course: “At every step of the planning for the course, it was important to recognize that the underlying and most complex problems stemmed from racism.”Footnote 56
At the beginning of its initial offering, students’ configuration of her classroom was the spatial antithesis of Bacon’s communion. As she recounts, “the problems of racial polarization which existed outside the classroom surfaced in the classroom. The Black students designated their space on one side of the room, and Whites sat on the other side. Two or three empty seats down the center of the room served as dividers.” She rearranged the seats into a semicircle. Further, “[i]n addition to the physical signs of polarization, there were elements of attitudinal polarization.”Footnote 57 Black students were suspicious of white students’ motives, regarded them as unworthy of engaging Black cultural achievement, and worried they would dominate course discussions, while white students resisted being called to account for their privileged presumptions, including those about whose art was putatively “universal.”Footnote 58 In this context, McElroy could not rely on verities asserting the humanities’ powers to liberalize. Instead, she embraced some features of interp while radically intervening in others: making clear that learning to “become a poem” and, in turn, the possibilities and limits of how lives dissolved into lives, required thinking explicitly, historically, and critically about which poems and whose lives.
McElroy was invested in the work and worth of oral interpretation to such an extent that she identified students’ lack of experience with it as yet another of her pedagogical challenges. She was explicit about sharing Bacon’s goal of making the assigned literature the primary focus, as well as his vision of performance as a way of knowing, to which she brought a Black genealogy of “reading aloud” Other-wise that was itself a prescient precursor to contemporary performance studies. As performance studies forebear Dwight Conquergood detailed in his article “Rethinking Elocution,” the oral recitation of literature was a valued, multigenerational live art in Black communities, citing bell hooks, who argued that “The roots of black performance arts emerge from an early nineteenth century emphasis on oration and the recitation of poetry.”Footnote 59 Hooks herself was part of this long tradition, noting that “[d]ramatic readings of poetry, monologues, or plays” were featured displays of talent in church and school settings and, like the beginnings of McElroy’s Cultural Workshop, in her home: “We were encouraged to learn the works of black poets, to recite them to one another. In daily life, this was both a means of sharing our cultural legacy and of resisting indoctrination from Eurocentric biases within educational systems that devalued black expressive culture.”Footnote 60 These were not simply aesthetic exercises or displays of individual virtuosity. They exemplify Mitchell’s articulation of affirmation and/as resistance. In his essay “Black Performance Studies,” Johnson draws on the work of D. Soyini Madison to underscore that these performances were epistemic, providing “space[s] for black culture to reveal itself to itself—to come to know itself in the process of doing.”Footnote 61 Like hooks, and the students in McElroy’s Cultural Workshop, he too participated in community events that “staged black plays and encouraged us children to memorize and recite the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes as a way to instill race pride and to counter the lack of exposure to black writers and artists in the public schools.”Footnote 62 Both poet and novelist Judy Juanita and her mentor, Black Arts Movement poet and playwright Sonia Sanchez, similarly discussed the importance of reading poems aloud, with Sanchez asserting that doing so was a form of theatre.Footnote 63 These activist practices supported McElroy’s embrace of interp as a critical tool and a disciplinary home by affirming that “communion” through performance was possible—even essential—in community. They offered direct experiences of what literature in performance actually did and could do in the world, contra abstract claims for the humanities’ putatively universal social goods. Her eventual NU performance studies colleagues, Conquergood and Johnson, and much of the field would ultimately make similar cases in their work in subsequent decades.
“The Interpretation of Black Drama” was structured like most department offerings into the mid-1980s. It was C-level—open to both undergraduate and graduate students—and required three performances over the academic quarter, each to be selected from specific groupings of course readings. The first two were solo; the last of the three could be done in a group. Performances were accompanied by analytical papers, the first of which required students to discuss the content and structure of the selection, synthesize issues facing the performer of the piece, and, crucially, provide “a clear and concise discussion of devices used by the playwright which suggest Black traditions and/or specific Black experiences/aesthetics.”Footnote 64 The second paper was a character study from the scene performed. Within this structure, McElroy made prescient and significant interventions into interp conventions, including explicitly centering performance practice and the acquisition of techniques: essential for her students to “put the issues inside of themselves,” as performance studies scholar Omi Osun (as Joni L. Jones) wrote of her own interp-inspired course goals decades later.Footnote 65 As part of this centering, McElroy brought the Cultural Workshop to campus and curricularized Black performance outside the university, thus blurring the boundaries between interp and its putative antithesis, “acting,” while bringing critical humanities work outside the university to bear on that inside it. But the most important of these interventions was McElroy’s strategically quiet but definitive vanquishing of the field’s lingering attachment to New Criticism as an analytical default while replacing it with a robust, comprehensive epistemic infrastructure rooted in Africanist aesthetics.
Africanist Aesthetics against the New Criticism
Midcentury Black intellectuals recognized immediately that the NC’s “enclosure of literature” from its social and political worlds rendered it a vector for white supremacy: a formalist approach to “universal” aesthetics legitimating the “large-scale exclusion of Black writing” from hegemonic literary studies.Footnote 66 Interpretation had vigorously embraced the method early on, particularly its view of poetry as a dramatic utterance, which was congenial to and supported its use of performance. Bacon’s view of it was more ambivalent than that of other peers, and sometimes contradictory; he relativized its importance in 1960, yet the 1979 edition of his textbook still positioned NC terminology and presumptions as foundational to the field.Footnote 67 NC’s zombielike persistence may have arisen from interp’s anxieties over the lack of field-specific methodologies to call its own, as well as a methodological interregnum before the rise and ubiquity of high theory. Later in the decade, some of Bacon’s white interp colleagues offered alternative theorizings of relationships between literature and performance, including those that would push the field toward “an exploration of performance in human life”: precisely the trajectory it would ultimately take in the early 1980s before the transition to performance studies.Footnote 68 McElroy took this approach in 1970, first and foremost by grounding her course in BAM articulations of Africanist aesthetics.
BAM poet and theatre scholar-critic Larry Neal defined an Africanist aesthetic as rooted in “an African-American cultural tradition. But this aesthetic is finally, by implication, broader than that tradition. It encompasses most of the useable elements of Third World culture.”Footnote 69 In his essay for The Black Aesthetic (1971), to which Fuller also contributed, Neal situated performance as central to his vision, evidenced by his citing “all aspects of Black dance styles in the New World” and “race memory” in rhythmic structures, among other genres, as examples.Footnote 70 Like the Wards quoted in a previous section, Neal saw Africanist aesthetics as a revolutionary imperative for Black artists because, he argued, poetry, and by extension, literary production generally, was not simply personal expression but “a concrete function, an action. No more abstractions. Poems are physical entities: fists, daggers, airplane poems, and poems that shoot guns. Poems are transformed from physical objects into personal forces.”Footnote 71 In his own analysis of Black performance studies genealogies, Johnson explains that these “personal forces” reverberate beyond the personal as intrinsically “generative forces, pressed into service to create and demarcate cultural meaning.”Footnote 72 Africanist aesthetics thus offered students of literature in performance a historically and socially grounded vocabulary for describing and analyzing formal properties and techniques of Black cultural production, as well as a theoretical frame that explained what these elements actually did for artists and audiences. Nothing could have been further from the NC’s ahistorical, formalist presumptions of the hermetically sealed text.
McElroy’s fieldwork-based dissertation evidences her commitment to, and scholarly expertise in, BAM articulations of Africanist aesthetics. It examines continuities between modes of African folk storytelling and BAM works by Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, and Melvin Van Peebles. Both her course’s required plays and its supplementary reading list drew from this commitment, including some of the same authors. She assigned nine plays: one for each meeting of the ten-week term, likely leaving the final session for performances and summary. All nine were by men, consistent with BAM–Black Nationalist norms, which, as theatre historian La Donna L. Forsgren explains, “equated the collective well-being of black people with black male agency.”Footnote 73 Forsgren cautions against assuming that Black women activist intellectuals of the movement were simply uncritically accepting and replicating this commitment in their own “conceptualization and dissemination of the black aesthetic as it relates to embodied performance.”Footnote 74 Instead, drawing on her oral histories of BAM activist artists, Forsgren argues that Black women negotiated spaces for their performance-based work in ways that foregrounded their own authority and concerns. McElroy’s Chicago theatre contemporaries Ward, Smith, and Brown are notable examples of this more complicated reality, and her dissertation and her “Interpretation of Black Drama” classroom were such spaces. Her 1975 article about her course for The Speech Teacher, the pedagogy journal of the Speech Communication Association (changed to National Communication Association in 1997), makes clear that she was the authoritative curator working from and with the Black Gaze: in the words of theorist and critic Tina Campt, “a critical framework [and] a reading apparatus … that describes an artist’s practice, and a spectatorial mediation that demands particularly active modes of watching, listening, and witnessing.”Footnote 75 This framework and apparatus were solidly but quietly BAM-invested in ways that were clearly discernible if readers knew how to listen.
The first three plays, which would serve as the options for students’ initial performances, were Theodore Ward’s Our Lan’ (1947), Langston Hughes’s Mulatto (first performed on Broadway in 1935), and Gilbert Moses’s Roots (anthologized in 1969); the second set included Ossie Davis’s Purlie Victorious (1961), Lonne Elder’s Ceremonies in Dark Old Men (1969), and James Baldwin’s Amen Corner (1954). The BAM plays concluded the course and were options for students’ final performances in groups: LeRoi Jones’s (Amiri Baraka’s) Dutchman (1964), Marvin X’s Take Care of Business (first produced in 1971, the year following “Interpretation of Black Drama’s” inaugural offering), In the Wine Time by Ed Bullins (first produced in 1968), and Charles Gordone’s No Place to Be Somebody (1969), which received the Pulitzer Prize in 1970, months before McElroy’s class debuted and is the first play by a Black author and the first Off-Broadway play to be so honored. Affirming her status as authoritative curator, McElroy explains that she “selected texts by utilizing [her] own standards of literary values. While all the plays chosen were concerned with some aspect of the Black experience, [they addressed] a wide variety of themes, styles, and approaches to dramaturgy.”Footnote 76 The organization of the texts reflects both the logic of the historical and aesthetic survey and, via her descriptions of each selection, an assertion of cross-generational continuity in BAM commitments with the BAM plays as the culmination. Specifically, in her summaries of their thematic and formal elements, she explicitly notes the ways Black/group consciousness appears in six of them, echoing the Wards’ discussion of the term’s historical-political significance and Fuller’s praise of Black Journey as a vector for its cultural force. Further, she characterizes elements of Purlie Victorious as “forerunners of Black revolutionary rhetoric of the 1960s” and notes Marvin X’s explicit “Black Muslim ideology” in Take Care of Business (214).
If her curation protocols seemed strategically quiet about her personal revolutionary commitments, at least to those who did not recognize her articulations of them, her supplementary reading list was anything but. She structured it topically: “General History Survey,” which included John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom: A History of American Negroes; “Political-Sociological Background,” featuring revolutionary and anticolonial works, among them Black Power by Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver, and Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon, as well as W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, among others; and “The Black Aesthetic Experience,” listing both Neal’s formative essay “The Black Arts Movement” and the aforementioned anthology The Black Aesthetic, as well as her dissertation: the only entry by a woman. In addition, she provided a list of “Periodicals,” including academic journals—The Black Scholar, The Journal of Black Studies—as well as Black Theatre magazine, Hoyt Fuller’s Black World, and Essence, among others (216–17). It was unusual to include such a list in interp undergraduate courses into the early 1980s: a further artifact of the NC’s view of secondary sources other than its own as superfluous, if not antithetical, to literary study. The list was yet another indicator of McElroy’s curatorial and pedagogical rigor and, because of its anomalousness within the typical interp curriculum as well as its content, also the source of some student consternation. As she wryly notes,
After the syllabus had been introduced, there were indications that the polarization of attitudes between students had shifted temporarily to polarization between students and teacher. After scanning such titles on the collateral list as Black Power, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and Black Skin, White Masks, some White students questioned the focus of the course. Questioning the number of requirements, some Black students indicated that a Black course taught by a Black sister should automatically include an “A” for every Black student. (213)
She responded simply and directly by emphasizing that the supplementary reading was useful for a better understanding of the plays: no overexplaining, no negotiating. Her mention of responses to her reading list, like her simple moving of the chairs into a semicircle to interrupt racial polarization, highlights both the repertoire of strategic quiet she deftly deployed to address the triple challenge she faced—being the first Black faculty member teaching the first Black drama course to a racially mixed group of first-time interpreters in her PWI school—and some of the strategic refusals within her repertoire.
Pedagogical Labors at a Crossroads
McElroy described her pedagogy as an intersection of Socratic intensity and directness with affective attentiveness, writing, “I provoked the students into volatile and spirited discourse. It was important to guard against subjective and personal confrontation which would have led to a breakdown of communication and discovery” (213). Though she did not assert it directly, we also know that she did not consider either the uncompensated raced and gendered labors of offering remedial instruction in how not to be a racist, or the soothing of students’ discomforts, to be her obligations. We know this from one of her Black students, whose entry in the required course journal (discussed below) McElroy included in her essay as quiet affirmation of this fact. The student writes:
I don’t know how much we will be able to accomplish until we are able to dispel some of the tension in the room. Everyone is so careful in what he [sic] says and how he says it in order not to be offensive to any one else. We won’t be able to make new discoveries about Black Theatre unless we can be honest with ourselves and in our statements to the other students in our class. Our teacher does not seem as though she intends to direct the discovery or even guide it in any one direction. She seems to want these discoveries to be entirely self-made without her editorials. I think this is a good move in that she will not alienate the White students immediately nor give the Black students an inside track. We will have to deal with each other. I hope we will. (212)
As McElroy explained using a classic interp pedagogical move, such discoveries happened because “students were encouraged to follow discourse which arose naturally and logically from the literature” (213): affirming that she was there to teach the interpretation of Black drama, just as Bacon was there to teach the interp of Shakespeare. Yet her status as both a new university teacher and “the One” required both the standard interp teaching repertoire and the negotiation of what performance studies scholar Bryant Alexander calls “the competing, contemptuous, and contributory elements of racial and cultural engagement in the classroom that are always present”: especially acute for Black faculty in PWIs at a tumultuous time.Footnote 77
If we grant that performance is ephemeral, teaching may be the most ephemeral genre of all. Performance history and its archives are biased toward the stage, not the classroom. Beyond what we know McElroy did in her pathbreaking course in this volatile period, and what we know she refused to do, how did she handle the day-to-day demands of teaching in this fraught moment? We know that, in addition to her general approach and her principled refusals of handholding, her moving the chairs, and the rigor of her reading lists, she faced challenges with students’ responses to the in-class performances that were standard features of the undergrad interp class. She writes, “During the early sessions, Black students seldom volunteered critiques concerning White students. However, Black students almost always applauded one another’s performance, whether it was good or bad. When White students offered critiques to Black students, sharp polarization often resulted” (215). What did these performances and critiques look and sound like? We know McElroy responded, in part, by curricularizing off-campus events, and that those in her classroom changed as a result. Did she also facilitate the students’ working out of critique practices? Her required journal assignment was yet another departure from interp classroom orthodoxy, flying in the face of NC admonitions against the affective fallacy: erroneously conflating the “meaning” of a work with how it makes us feel. We know she intended it to include “personal accounts of reactions to the course, materials, and contemporary experiences. Publications on art, theatre, politics, etc., should be read and probings noted in the journal” (213). Certainly, this was a tool for assessing students’ attention to coursework and readings, and certainly some students were candid about classroom dynamics as the previously cited example indicates, but what was it like for McElroy to read these entries beyond confirming their engagement? How did she respond to them? What was it like for her students to write them? Given NU faculty demographics in 1970, including those in the Department of Interpretation, this was likely the first time any of them had a Black professor.Footnote 78 Did they pour out their expectations, anxieties, and resistances in these entries? Did they tactically write around them? One way to approach these ephemeral pedagogical dynamics, admittedly asymptotically, is through the work of Black faculty from the interp tradition in subsequent generations.
In her essay “Teaching in the Borderlands,” performance studies scholar Omi Osun (as Joni L. Jones) describes her “Performance of Dramatic Literature” course as a “crossroads,” a “borderland.”Footnote 79 Like McElroy’s class decades before, it focused on Africana texts, was inspired by Bacon’s vision of the analysis and performance of literature as a vehicle for engaging “the otherness of others,” and was offered at a PWI—making it a useful analogue from which to imagine the issues she encountered in her classroom performances, what the performances themselves might have looked like, and how she might have prepared students for them. Osun makes the complexities of such performances clear, writing:
Young blonde women perform Yorùbá deities, Latinos play South African musicians, Asian American women play African American teenagers, and of course, my African American students explore, through their bodies, worlds they find both familiar and new. This is often a painful time, full of complex discussions of archetypes and stereotypes, construction of identity, and our mutual complicity in the continuation of oppression.Footnote 80
Like McElroy, Osun used journaling as one way to encourage students to probe these complexities, as well as a robust set of in-class exercises designed to defamiliarize self and stereotypes, among them improvisatory role-playing using course texts and elements of everyday life. Given McElroy’s own career as a director and performer, she likely deployed similar tools—perhaps intervening in a student’s first performance to ask them to think more deeply about a particular interaction or to shift a point of view. Like Osun, she may have divided students strategically into groups to intensify their working out of performance strategies and critical practices, likely frustrating them initially while catalyzing collaborations across the multiple polarizations she initially encountered.
D. Soyini Madison, a colleague of both Bacon’s and McElroy’s, offers an account of how such a strategy works. Exhausted from a long day, she is set upon by “Kevin,” a white student bemoaning that his self-congratulatory good intentions have not immunized him from Black students’ critiques; he clearly wants her to fix his discomfort. She refuses to pat him on the head pedagogically and say “there, there,” and instead places him in a performance group with “Sandra” and “Charice,” about whom he whines, “they hate me.”Footnote 81 Sandra and Charice aren’t happy about this either, especially when Madison rebuffs their initial impulse to cast Kevin only as the voice of white oppression. Much complaining ensues until Madison tells them “to ‘just do it’ and to look to each other for support”; which they did, creating an intricate in-class performance that inspires them to collaborate on a future assignment.Footnote 82 In terms that resonate with Osun’s as well as with likely inevitable dimensions of McElroy’s day-to-day pedagogy, Madison explains, “it was important for Sandra, Charice, and Kevin to cross certain thresholds and move beyond certain comfort zones. I wanted them to collaborate in creating a scene where some perspectives were internalized and others interrogated based on critical choices they could later defend. I wanted them to understand with more clarity why certain perspectives symbolized worthwhile enemies.”Footnote 83
While Madison’s pedagogical intervention drives her account, it is also clear that it required deeply demanding—indeed, frustrating and exhausting—work in and outside of the classroom. She told her students to “just do it,” as we can imagine McElroy did, but they couldn’t have without the conceptual scaffolding and the highly specific teacherly insights she provided, including seeing each individual clearly and knowing when and how both to push and to let go. Like Osun and likely McElroy, Madison also managed the stress of taking a pedagogical risk that might not have paid off instructionally and blown up instead. In McElroy’s case, balancing risk meant gambling that classroom conflicts could deepen understanding while at the same time operating on alert to ensure that they did not devolve into precisely the unproductive personal confrontations she sought to avoid. As Alexander explains, doing so demands focused attention to classroom dynamics in real time, and especially to eruptions of affective intensities, like those in his own classroom critiques of a problematic performance focused on race: “The discussion is a hotbed of issues that … threaten[ed] the boundaries of civility—with raised tones, flushed faces, and hurt feelings.”Footnote 84
But “The One’s” pedagogical labors are not only confined to the classroom. Alexander also reflects on the tender ambivalences of outside, one-on-one exchanges he analyzed for his dissertation examining interactions between Black male students and Black male faculty at his own PWI: reflections that help us imagine McElroy’s exchanges with her Black students on the pages of their journals and in the intimacies of office hours decades before. Alexander explains:
At 34, my melanin rushed through my ears like fire when as part of my dissertation, young Black men told me of their pain in the predominantly White university as it related to cultural languaging, issues of diversity and affinity, tokenism, and points of reference and racial bias—and doubtfully asked if I had experienced the same. They asked doubtfully because they perceived me as being so respected by my White colleagues; doubtfully because I got along; doubtfully because in some ways I could pass, not racially but in that performatively academic way; doubtfully because I was not only a Black graduate student but a Black graduate teaching associate, who had undoubtedly passed some test of acceptability.Footnote 85
Perhaps the BAM content of McElroy’s course and the radical nature of her reading list gave her Black students permission to be less doubtful in their interpersonal exchanges with her. Perhaps her navigation of the crossroads connecting quiet, the acknowledgment of structural racism, and self-affirmation offered them a path through it for themselves.
Conclusion
By the mid-1970s, the BAM in Chicago and beyond was dissipating, though McElroy continued to teach BAM texts, now in two additional courses devoted to poetry and prose as well as “Interpretation of Black Drama.” The movement’s contributions also circulated on the NU campus, leaving a legacy that includes the works of esteemed historian Sterling Stuckey, McElroy’s grad student contemporary, and Angela Jackson, who was recruited to the campus by Fuller from the Organization of Black American Culture and ultimately became Illinois’s poet laureate. Madison, herself an alum of Kuumba, joined the department as a graduate student in 1984 and performed Jackson’s work for her required graduate recital.
By the late 1970s, undergraduate enrollments in the Department of Interpretation were robust, but there were new challenges on the horizon, accelerated by new commitments to specialization and professionalization in US higher education. For example, Interp scholarship was less visible in flagship journals, a situation likely exacerbated by its continuing attachment to NC, just as robust publication records became critical for disciplinarity legibility. Interp negotiated crises of social and intellectual worth and epistemic legibility sooner than most humanities disciplines, ultimately both succumbing to and transmuting them. It accomplished the latter by institutionalizing central elements of McElroy’s project, including an embrace of performance practice as epistemic and world making in its own right, not simply as a tool for an analytical encounter with the text; criticality rooted in cultural and political economic particularity against NC white-washed universalizing; field-based approaches to aesthetics as living genealogies; pedagogy that emphasized literature in performance beyond the university, as well as inside it; and reflexive movements into and out of the self, only further and with more specificity in each direction.
Over a decade after McElroy first entered her classroom, African American literature scholar Nellie McKay concluded her personal essay “Black Woman Professor—White University” with this assertion: “To be a black woman professor in a white university is difficult and challenging, but it is exciting and rewarding, and black women professors like it here. We aim to stay!”Footnote 86 McElroy stayed. She taught in universities for half a century, earning the honorific “Queen Professor” for her work with generations of students. Her teaching made history in a revolutionary time from her position in a small, odd, and anxious field that she transformed. It took over a decade to catch up to her. And she was not alone. Consider, as only one example, the career of artist-scholar Wallace Ray Peppers, professor of African American literature in performance who, as E. Patrick Johnson notes, “[q]uietly, yet radically transform[ed]” his communication department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, just as McElroy did at Northwestern.Footnote 87 Yet accounts of these radical visionary field builders remain “unstoried” except in the memories of their students.
Teaching labors are rarely monumentalized or given epistemic regard in the academy’s prestige hierarchies, in disciplinary genealogies, and likely even in our own assessments of our achievements. They are just Tuesdays, not history: we meet our classes, meet our students, meet our writing deadlines, meet our families’ needs, maybe meet our own. If we’re lucky, we have a department chair who fully sees our work and documents its significance for the archive. When we can, we do too, in designated “pedagogy journals,” the status of which may be regarded as lesser than other historically or critically focused outlets. The academy is not unique in its paucity of published accounts of its pioneering teachers. As Sandra Richards and Sidney J. Lemelle note, “little attention has been given to the ways in which leaders who are of African descent have framed issues of education within Black Liberation Movements and used education as a tool of revolutionary practice.”Footnote 88 Writing from a performance-centered perspective in her conclusion to her oral history collection, Sistuhs in the Struggle, Forsgren argues that “Black women intellectuals of today and their anti-racist allies are charged with the solemn task of preserving” the radical interventions of BAM women artists on the stage and on the page.Footnote 89 McElroy’s radical transformation of the oral interpretation of literature from within the BAM ecosystem argues powerfully for taking up this charge by including our pioneering teachers and their evanescent and revolutionary innovations.
