An Interview with Farah Jasmine Griffin

Abstract

An Interview with Farah Jasmine Griffin Charles H. Rowell This interview was conducted by telephone on June 16, 1999, between Charlottesville, Virginia, and Hartford, Connecticut. ROWELL You have written on a variety of subjects, including pedagogy and literary texts, and migration and African-American literature, and different issues in feminist studies. And you have also commented on autobiographical narratives, film, travel literature, visual art, and other African-American expressive forms. You ended your first booklength study “Who set you flowin’?”: The African-American Migration Narrative (1995) with a seminal description of Toni Morrison’s novel Jazz, a comment which I think could also apply to jazz itself as a musical form. You refer to the novel Jazz as a “portrait of a people in the midst of self-creation, a document of what they created and what they lost along the way.” I’m almost inclined to argue that such is your project, your intellectual project: to show that black people in the USA have been made objects, to deconstruct those objects, and in the process to restore black people to their humanity, their agency, while recovering and (re)presenting their subjectivity. That seems to me to be your project, especially in light of your focused interest in recovering and restoring black women and their texts. Your recovery work, especially the letters (between Rebecca Primus and Addie Brown) you edited in Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends (1999), should make a significant impact on the historiography of black New England. GRIFFIN You’re very astute. When I wrote that last line, initially I wrote it about Morrison’s text. But I thought, I hoped, that’s what Who set you flowin’? would do also; I hoped that what I was saying about Jazz would be true of the critical book that I just finished writing as well. At the time I wasn’t thinking about the broader project, the work that was to come, but now that I hear you say it, I think that it certainly applies to the other project or the larger project in general. ROWELL Will you talk about your academic project in general? GRIFFIN I think that for the most part mine is a project that is very interested in the agency of black people (especially African Americans)—their political, social and creative agency. I’ve been very much interested in the effects of white supremacy and the ways that black people have tried to counter that, particularly in our art, in our music, and in our literature. When I say white supremacy, I don’t just mean the kind [End Page 872] of horrific things that were done to our bodies physically. But also the psychic scars caused by white supremacy—and in terms of the ways that we might have internalized some of the negative things that came out of the white supremacist venture. I think that our artists especially have been at the forefront of trying to give us a different picture of ourselves. When I say artists, I mean that in the broader sense: the writers, the musicians and the visual artists as well. I think that has been the driving force behind a lot of the critical work that I’ve done, the critical question that has shaped what direction I would go in. How have we as a people managed not only to survive but to thrive in the face of this massive onslaught of physical and discursive violence against us? In addition to that I think I also try to demonstrate how complex our experience has been, to complicate understandings of that experience. You know, if our notion of migration is just of forced movement from Africa through the Middle Passage or of the Great Migration then I am interested in other kinds of mobility—travel for leisure, education, missionary work and the like. If our notion of 19th-century black life is determined by the institution of slavery, then I’m very interested in what life looked like for those people who were not slaves, who did not live in the South. ROWELL Please talk about your work as an editor—i. e., Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends...