Faculty & Student Collaborations

in James Baldwin Review
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7227/JBR.9.12
Online publication date: 26 Sep 2023
Number: Volume 9: Issue 1

Abstract
Music lives and breathes through the spaces of much of James Baldwin’s oeuvre.
This article introduces a course that features Baldwin’s musical literature and
teaches students to compose music inspired by their newfound knowledge of
Baldwin. The course, entitled “James Baldwin’s Song,” was taught in the department
of Africana Studies at Williams College in fall 2021. It guided students
to listen to Baldwin in a different way—through a musical lens and by relating
Baldwin’s wisdom to their own lives. This article takes readers behind the scenes as
it shares some of the curricular choices that guided the course and student insights
gleaned from it. Though students heard many things in Baldwin’s musical oeuvre,
two ideas sang out most clearly: that the blues was not just music but was also a
way of living, and that joy differed from happiness. Accordingly, the second half
of this article illustrates these key concepts as featured in original songs from the
professor and student co-authors.

Faith and Rejoice by William Murray ’25 and Elijah Parks

Knock Down This Wall by Rashida K. Braggs

Follow this link to the  full article.

Appearing in the December 30, 2023, e-edition of the Miami Herald, this editorial emerged from 2023 winter study course, AFR 24: “Touring Black Environmental Futures in the ‘New’ South,” which centers a three-week visit in Tallevast, a small Black community on Florida's Gulf Coast.

The impacts industrial pollution on the natural resources of Black and Brown communities have been well documented in scholarship and the media, but what is transpiring in the unincorporated, Gulf Coast community of Tallevast is particularly remarkable.

A historically Black community that sits just north of the Sarasota/Bradenton Airport, Tallevast is enduring a coordinated onslaught of environmental assaults. Manatee County government has rendered the community as an inevitable sacrifice for generating commercial revenue.

Follow this link to the full article.