Kaiama L. Glover (KLG): I always ask the same first question, which is about narrative, silence, history, and power, as related to the specific purchase of women’s interventions in public discourse. I’d love to hear your thoughts on that. We are going to start with you, Martha.

Martha S. Jones (MSJ): I thought I would tell you what came to my mind as I have reflected these weeks on this question, and it comes from a different place, but I hope you’ll let me make the intervention.

Many years ago, legal scholar Jerome Culp plumbed the question of silence in the academy in his 1991 article, “Autobiography and Legal Scholarship and Teaching: Finding the Me in the Legal Academy.” Plumb is a polite word. Culp was terribly vexed about the degree to which white supremacy—my words, not his—continued to determine not only what and who was in the legal academy, but what was scholarship. What was worthy of the imprimatur of the law journal?

His experience, as a Black man standing at the podium in a law school like Duke, where he taught for many years, was the extraordinary degree to which students demanded that he break a kind of silence. In the first class, the question would come, “Where did you go to law school? How did you get here? Who are you?” Culp was a brilliant and pretty cheeky guy, and he had a provocative answer, which was a truth: He was the son of a poor coal miner. That was part of his biography, but the lesson that he wanted to teach us in that story was about the power of silence, and not the perniciousness of silence, but the power. What Culp understood well was the ways in which silence, in our world of academia, meant that some members of the faculty enjoyed the assumption of merit, the assumption of excellence, the assumption of belonging, and that others of us were never permitted silence. Because students, remarkably, along with colleagues, will query us about our bodies, about our persons, about our very beings, about our biographies, about our genealogies, openly and notoriously, and we, then, are drawn into a kind of unsilencing that only furthers the distance between us and the colleagues who maintain the silence.

Culp’s project was not successful, but I think what he wanted to do was provoke those who were hiding behind their own silence and benefiting from the kinds of assumptions that came to them as a consequence of that—he wanted to goad them into putting their own stories on the table, breaking the silence that is essential to white supremacy in the academy. And I have wrestled with that ever since—what to disclose, how to disclose. For a long time in my professional life, I thought it was important to keep all that wrapped up. I thought that was where my power lay. And maybe that was true. But today, I do a kind of teaching and a kind of writing and a kind of speaking that attempts to open some of that up to scrutiny and to discover what kind of power there is when I, as a Black woman in the academy, actually tell my own story. It doesn’t do the work that Culp hoped it would do, which is to say, I don’t think it shifts the balance of power in places like hiring committees. But it has permitted the construction of another kind of power and another kind of community that, for me, this series really embodies.

KLG: Thank you so much, Martha. We are going to come back to this question of the power of alternative communities. It’s been brought up before, about when to speak and for whom—the question of audience. Who do we care to speak to? But Jessica, please, if you would offer some initial thoughts.

Jessica Marie Johnson (JMJ): I really love this question. I love how different people have answered it. I love, Martha, your answer, and I find that I am stuck between two kinds of responses. I’m thinking back to Maboula [Soumahoro]’s response, about what it means to be called an activist in the academy. What does it mean to walk into a room and be overrepresented in your Black woman figure, and to know that it’s doing a particular kind of work in the room that it is not doing for your colleagues who are presenting as male, who are presenting as white, whatever it might be.

#WhatDoesAProfessorLookLike is a hashtag that has been going around since maybe 2015, 2017, and it still comes back around because it is needed, and that’s a very real reality—that there is something that speaks before we appear. There’s something that speaks in our names when they appear on paper. There’s something that speaks in the work that we do.

I am really privileged and blessed to have ended up in a department where, in the junior cohort, we are obviously not all Black, and we are not all necessarily non-Black either, but we are all doing work that, even within our respective fields of empire or Europe or whatever it might be, are pushing the boundaries of the field. There has been something very important about speaking to our experiences and speaking to communities that have not always had the space in scholarship, in the public sphere, and in the media.

There’s that impulse, and then there’s the other impulse, which is to question this idea that there has ever been silence. I say this as someone who is very new to the academy, who is first generation in all the things, but it strikes me that the ways that academic privilege—elite privilege—replicates itself is in very intimate ways, by asking, “Who are you? Where did you go to school? Who else do you know?” Those are things that need to be asked because those are relations that, among a certain academic elite class, they already have. You already know who went to the Ivies. Your adviser’s adviser is part of your genealogy of your doctorate or your master’s degree or your law degree, whatever it might be.

These are the ways these relations already existed. They were already heavily intimate. It’s one of the reasons that smokers at AHA [American Historical Association] were such an issue, because they were these spaces for masculine—white masculine, in particular—socialization. Then, out of contestation with that, you have the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. Out of contestation with white scholars closing out Black historians and Black scholars, you have things like ASALH [the Association for the Study of African American Life and History].

So there’s something to me about not just the privilege of silence—though I think it’s very, very real—but also the privilege not to have to ask that question, not to have to ask about my white male colleagues’ intimate practices, not to have to ask who they are having drinks with, who else is on their committee, who is also an adviser, how many generations of PhDs are created in any given department that then come back to that same department to be employed. These are the kinds of things that are so assumed and so ingrained; they don’t need to be outed as silence. But they also are very loud. These are the actual intimate practices that maintain difference and privilege in the academy.

There’s something interesting there. On the one hand, yes, there is a reality to stepping out and, literally, my body being a spoken word. Then, the other side of it is that we just don’t assume that that same spoken word operates on X white male colleague. We take it for granted that it does not. That’s the piece that is both challenging for even the most well-meaning white colleagues who want to do the work, particularly in this Black Lives Matter moment, and also it is the piece that we need to continue to confront—that all of our intimacies are always on the table. Whether they should be or not is probably the better question than whether they actually are, because they always have been.

KLG: I am struck by the persistent ambivalence that both of you seem to be touching on. Even the terms that I have used to frame this, power being one of them, that term is not—the pun is terrible, but it’s happening—it’s not black and white. There are ways in which this power is out there in a way that can be approached differently, depending on the context. This brings me back to what Marlene [Daut] was saying about when we can walk out of the room or, again, what Maboula was saying about her body doing all of the talking. Is it more powerful for her to speak against whatever that body is saying, or should she just turn around and say, “I don’t have time for this”?

So this is a question that I wanted to ask the two of you, in particular, because I don’t know if it feels like this for you at Johns Hopkins University, but there is a little nugget of power that comes from your intimacy as colleagues, as friend-colleagues, as collaborators, as like-minded in your approach to pedagogy, in relation to what happens within the walls of campus and also regarding what your responsibilities are to the outside world. I’m wondering if you can talk about that, about what that position feels like in terms of power, and how, if at all, that thing I’m calling some sort of power can be marshaled to create alternative communities, to create alternative genealogies. That was a beautiful word you have introduced into this conversation, Jessica.

MSJ: I’m not going to speak for Dr. Johnson, but I suspect that I might be more interested in power than she is—or at least, I feel that way oftentimes when we are working. That is to say that I now recognize, and perhaps it is the beauty of hindsight, that part of my style and part of my way of working and being in the academy has been always to approach power—to learn, as best I can, how it works, to experience what it’s like when I can garner a little bit of it. That has meant, at some moments, I am able to go places and to be things, to contribute to what I think of as the disruption or the dismantling of the academy in ways that are meaningful to me. But it has also meant that I have confronted the stark limits of whatever bit of power I imagine that I exercise.

The thing I want to say, and the conversation that I confess I do crave, is one in which, more directly, Black women who occupy or possess a bit of conventional power in the academy, that we talk about that. That is to say, it took a very long time for me to work for a woman in the academy, and I have still never worked for a Black woman. But I know y’all are out there, and you’re doing things and building things and dismantling things and making things happen and making decisions.

That, to me, seems almost generationally distinct from where I began my career. Where we saw Black women was, perhaps, on our faculties. There was one in my graduate program as I was coming up at Columbia. But we are in a distinct place now. I don’t want to name-check, but when an Alondra Nelson is running first the college at Columbia, and then the SSRC [Social Science Research Council], and on and on; when Elizabeth Alexander goes to the Mellon Foundation . . . I do think that there are concrete lessons that come from that. But more importantly, I want to know how our critical Black feminist capacities—robust, creative, transformative, even—are informing that kind of work. Is it possible, right? Is it even possible to maintain, to persist, to bring all you have learned, all that you are, to those kinds of spaces, those kinds of roles? Or are we inevitably changed when we get too close to power and when we even wield a little bit of it?

KLG: Talking about infiltration here, to some extent, and what the cost could be as you do that work in those spaces, Jessica, do you have some thoughts?

JMJ: I’m not uninterested in power. I’m actually very interested in power. I want to pick up on what you were saying about possibilities. Power is certainly the keyword, but I think possibility is also a keyword here. We are both concerned about what possibilities are available. I’m interested in what are the possibilities of Black freedom, in particular, whether it’s in the academy or well beyond.

What are the possibilities available to people in different positions, I think, is an important question—like for someone like Alondra Nelson, who is magnificent and brilliant, or someone like Elizabeth Alexander, who’s also magnificent and brilliant, and like yourself. What are the possibilities of the university as a structure, and what are the possibilities that are beyond and that are also about dismantling all the things that make the university an industrial complex in the way that it has increasingly become?

Some of those possibilities mean direct confrontations with power. I think of the Johns Hopkins students doing the Gilman sit-in.1 I think of the students who are organizing around Lorgia García-Peña’s tenure case at Harvard, the students at University of Chicago who are organizing to unionize, who are fighting for the right to be able to do that. All around the country, there are movements happening among faculty, tenure track and non-tenure track, among staff, trying to create space and possibility out of a structure—the university as a structure—that has replicated itself by foreclosing possibility and foreclosing opportunities and foreclosing demographics or exploiting demographics that have come to seek knowledge or seek space from their own situations.

So, I am really interested in that, and I think that possibility can happen. I hope that it can happen as people occupy certain positions of power. I am also skeptical of positions that are created within the academy itself as the sole mechanism for activism and agitation, because again, the university exists to replicate a kind of truncation of freedom and space and air to breathe. What are the ways that those spaces and those positions, either through challenges from other sectors of the university, the town, town-gown situation, the city, the ’hood, the maroon swamps, wherever they might be—how can those positions be pushed?

But in the end, are those the positions that we want? I’m thinking of what Dylan Rodriguez said in the Ethnic Studies Rise roundtable.2 I’m paraphrasing: Maybe the point is to make the university unrecognizable to itself. Afterward, do those positions still exist? Do different versions of them exist?

In 2015 or 2016, at the Allied Media Conference, I had the privilege and the honor of cohosting a network gathering called “Dismantling the Ivory Tower” with Kai Green, Moya Bailey, and Van Bailey, who are some of the smartest organizer/activist/scholars that I have ever encountered. One of the things that came out of that was the realization that the best parts of the academy, the best pieces that we wanted to take with us, the pieces that we actually wanted to reproduce, were labor issues: space to write, space to think with archives or documents or texts, space to create, resources to create so that people didn’t feel like they were starving, health care, summers “off”—off, quote unquote—because we’ve seen what this summer has been.

These are things that are part of and pockets of the institution, that I think are some of the best things to carry out of it. But they are also the things that the university kind of holds over our heads—that a university holds over its workers’ heads as ways to police, to self-discipline, to say, “Don’t speak too loudly because we’ll take this from you, or we’ll cut your benefits.” Those are the kinds of grapplings that, well, if we think of really dismantling the university, it’s going to look nothing like what it did. But, as with all abolitionist tracks, nothing in society will look the same.

KLG: You just ended with the word abolition, abolitionist, but what you were talking about all the way along, obviously, is more like marronage, right? So maybe we could talk about marronage in its widest sense, not only petit/grand—that is, small acts of refusal versus full-throated attempts at escape from the material reality of literal enslavement—but also as a metaphor. So, when I am thinking about marronage, I also am not just thinking about escape, but the workarounds, the ways of doing with what one has in the space one is granted, or within the constraints one is granted.

MSJ: Maybe I should go first before Jessica tells us what the word really means. I want to use the idea in a more capacious sense to say that, for me, reflecting on marronage was really a way to understand my own strategy and my own trajectory in the academy. There have been many moments, maybe too many moments, when I have encountered resistance and more. I was remembering today that the first time I did an exhibition, a brick-and-mortar exhibition—it couldn’t have been more conventional—and I shared it with the colleagues in my department. Someone sort of tossed the postcard on the table and said, “We just don’t do this.” And I thought, “Wow.” And there are lots of moments like that—the “We just don’t do this.”

So, what to do? For me, it has been to fugue. It has been to flee. It has been to find and to construct another kind of community within the vastness that is many of our universities. My best compatriots, my allies, my fellow travelers have been librarians and curators and artists. I have gone places I’ve never imagined in part because of the need to change, to fugue, to remake my own space and my own community. I think that’s the way I have survived, and maybe even the way I have thrived—to the extent that I have thrived—because I’ve followed that old venerable and essential instinct, which is to recognize that this is a space that is not only not productive but that can’t see me, that this is a space that is sort of toxic, that this is a space that tells me, “We don’t do what you do.” And it turns out there always are folks who see it otherwise. I think that if I have been successful, it’s because I have been willing to, in a sense, make myself a fugitive and build someplace else, through the kind of visions, through the sense of possibility that I carry, even as within the conventional space of a department or a school, I have been perceived as out of bounds.

I think the thing to say, and then I’ll hand it over to Jessica, is that this has brought me into some curious places. It is partly how I got curious about power, because there are moments in which the people with less power are less hospitable to my vision or my possibility, and I can find at least a temporary haven with folks who turn out to have a great deal more influence than those who have been my adversaries in the academy.

KLG: I like that point that it has brought you to some curious places. It’s a beautiful idea—out of the resistance and the hostility can come spaces where you can indulge a curiosity and find something that you didn’t expect. Jessica, maybe you’ll pick up on this as well. Just your mention of the ways in which this marronage doesn’t necessarily have to be in the lines of the work that you are doing specifically, but that there are alternative artifacts and practices that can contribute to getting you to these curious spaces. You mentioned art. We’re talking about the digital. We’re talking about multimedia. What are these alternative artifacts and conversations you can have around the work you thought you were going to do that can land you in a curious place?

JMJ: I think you are a maroon, Martha, perhaps more than you think you are, because there’s another thing that maroons had to know, that fugitive enslaved Africans had to know—they had to know about power. They had to know where power was more than slave owners did. They needed to know where slave catching raids might come from or patrols might be. They needed to know who might catch them, and they needed to know who, even within the enslaved community, would be able to have their back.

That’s what I hear you articulating, the ways that we need to be exquisitely knowledgeable about how things work in places. We don’t have to agree with them, and we don’t have to be prepared to take everything down immediately, but we do have to know how it works because that is the kind of knowledge that lets us find the path through the swamp, as opposed to the road where the paddy rollers are rolling. That is something that I also increasingly learned, working alongside Martha.

I do want to talk a little bit about Electric.Marronage.3 It fits into this conversation in some really unanticipated ways. The project started more years ago than I quite remember, a collaboration between me and Dr. Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vàsquez, who is at Michigan State University (MSU). What we were trying to think through were some of the ideas and concerns that Martha is articulating, like, in this space that feels like it wants to kind of crunch and condense all the things that have made us—me and Dr. Figueroa, in particular—made our experience possible. The kinds of flagrant feminisms and rabid commitment to the Kitchen Table, to Black women, to Black womanhood, to community, that has sustained us in so many ways through our journey in life, not just into the academy—that those things were not only not seen in the academy, speaking of silence, but were denigrated—“acting a certain way” denigrated: being too much, too Black, too flagrant, too ratchet, too this, too that, too hoodrat—don’t be that, don’t be all the things that have made us survive. . . .

So, how, in that space of the university, if those were the rules that had to be danced to for a certain part of the day, what were the other spaces that we could create? We were both very interested in the digital humanities, and so we conceived of Taller Electric Marronage as an online space that could exist otherwise. Since then, it has become this beautiful project, more than we could even have expected. It’s both a site and an event series. The first event series was hosted at MSU last spring. It was cut short, unfortunately, because of Covid, but we did host Drs. Randi Gill-Sadler and Savannah Shange. Then we did podcasts with them. Those podcasts are on the website.4

We also were able to work with some amazing graduate students who are trying to forge their own kind of escape and their own fugitivity. We have the pleasure of working with Christina Thomas, who is the lead editor and based at Johns Hopkins University (JHU), Halle-Mackenzie Ashby, Kelsey Moore, Ayah Nuriddin. All of them are on the JHU side, and on the MSU side, we have Jada Similton and Stephany Bravo. Sarah Bruno, a graduate student at Northwestern University, has also joined us. Together, they are called “the Electricians.”

There are other people who have been involved and who will be supporting the work, particularly as it moves to Johns Hopkins in the fall. People like Margaret Burri at the Sheridan Libraries at Hopkins have been extremely supportive. Jennifer Kingsley in Museums and Society has been very supportive. The podcast gurus, especially Donte Smith at MSU, because you give your tech support props for doing things that you can’t possibly do!

We have populated the Electric Marronage site and space on social media, and we meet in person with each other. We have a Slack channel that goes all day, all the time, for alternative knowledge that gets created: knowledge that appreciates the ways that our families are part of how we create scholarship, that appreciates the ways that thinking about fugitivity and enclosure go hand in hand and the ways that they diverge. We are interested in Black and Brown life, in particular, and with Indigenous life and humanity. The Electricians move across borders. They move across archipelagos.

We have made this space that is our swamp to abscond away to when things are too tough. It’s a three-year project, so we will be continuing it into next year. But Taller Electric Marronage is one of those things that can be created when the power that we have as faculty—me and Dr. Figueroa—can be shared, can be spliced, redistributed, stolen—in the kind of Harney and Moten sense—and used in a different direction. Maybe these are seeds for a different kind of academy, a different kind of university, and maybe they are too small to be seeds. I’m a big fan of ephemerality, so I think that that’s fine. Maybe instead of seeds we are just marking a moment to be here and to rest and to have a dance and have a drink, but that is still something. That is also an important part of the story that we’re telling, that we’re unsilencing.

KLG: Thank you, Jessica. My final question is something of a departure, but you invited us, Jessica—and so did you, Martha—to step outside the academy and think about these other spaces, whether through marronage or through wielding power in other institutions, as it were. I want to talk about both of your work in the more public sphere, so your roles as public scholars or educators of the public—like the incredible Black Womanhood Syllabus, for example, or the fact, Jessica, that you give history lessons on Twitter.5

The underlying question that I want to ask about that work—when you take on the responsibility of educating the public, beyond the space of campus —is how do you get to complexity? How do you do justice to the things that you have distilled and deciphered in your teaching over weeks and months and years and writing prizewinning books about? How do you get that on Twitter, in the Atlantic, in the Post, in a form that does honor to the depth and complexity of the subjects that you are grappling with?

MSJ: It would be fair to say, on some level, I have to let other people be the judge of whether I actually get to what you describe, Kaiama. But I would say, for me, there came a time when the public work was many things, including part of my own process, which is to say that I needed to be more out of the academy with my ideas and more in the roiling, fraught, not always safe but I think important public space that we step into when we write for news outlets or we spend time on Twitter.

I’m somebody who makes sense of it because I’m interested in staying around for the long haul. So, I don’t think any one tweet or any one op-ed is the project at all. It is about being a sustained presence, a sustained set of ideas, about coming back again and again. It’s a conversation in those spaces, isn’t it? It’s not simply a one-off for me. So, I think that my sense of integrity and my sense of the value of that work is an outgrowth of my willingness to stay in for the long game and be part of sustained exchanges with people, whether it’s many, many tweets over many, many days or a series of writings on a related subject. They are our body of work. None of them is the entirety of what I hope to say, what I need to say. I see it as a body of work.

Maybe only I see it that way because I am the only one who sees the whole. But I hope people glimpse parts of it and stay with me over time, and I hope people ask me questions. One of the things that is very important to me about that space, that is different than the classroom, different than the workshop or the seminar, is that people are more inclined to ask the things they really need to know. I’m interested in that, and I’m here for that, even when those are hard questions for me. I’m here for them, and it takes me and my work to new places by encountering questions and grappling with them in real time or taking them away and thinking about them for days and weeks and years before I learn how to engage with them well.

KLG: Thank you. That was incredibly, beautifully put. Jessica?

JMJ: I feel very similarly. I have been on Twitter for almost a decade now and have been somewhere on the internet for as long or longer. The long haul is absolutely true and has to be part of this work. But the arc of my public engagement has moved so much. Once upon a time, the internet was smaller. There were fewer of us on it. It was definitely a space where I found community and craved community and created community, and those are people I talked to. Now those are people I talk to in real life. I have group chats with them. I see them in person when I can, or on screens when I can. So, there’s ways that the internet is not the same—for me, at least—although I do think there’s a kind of circular motion to the internet. As people get on it, they begin in smaller communities and enclaves and then branch out.

I think that the internet has changed, and so, my relationship to what I am doing and what kind of engagement is needed, and what that complexity looks like, has also changed. There are things that I don’t explain on the internet, necessarily, because I’m not sure that they can be laid out clearly. But then there are moments—for example, the Viola Davis cover in juxtaposition with “The Scourged Back” image.6 There are moments where the work that I’m engaged in, the length of time I’ve been able of speak to the people I feel I’m accountable to online, and the luck I have had in being able to piece together thoughts in 140 or, well, now it’s 280 characters, come together in a fruitful way. But I don’t think that is always the case.

Martha, I remember that you had some tweets when the news was circulating about children being separated from families and children in the concentration camps because of ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], and how that went viral. There are moments when—often unfortunately—the stars align, and we, who have the knowledge and have done the deep work, and who have had the privilege and the space to do the deep work, can speak back to current events. I don’t think that’s an academic thing. It’s those who have been in the discipline of Black study, whether you are in the academy, whether you are an organizer, whether you are an activist, whether you are in policy work, whatever it might be. These moments come, and you have to get into the nitty-gritty.

But I also think there are some complex things that are just hard to piece out, and so, that’s where the long haul becomes very, very important. Because both the commitment that you have made to being accountable online, and to whom you’re accountable, shows through in how you are able to hold and witness for yourself and for those communities and for those complex issues. If we are always challenging ourselves to see the complications, to see the messy, to see the things that don’t have easy resolutions, then we are doing the best work that we can be doing. The challenge is to always curve the line a little bit, or a lot, and find ways to see the complications even online.

KLG: I can see the ways in which your scholarship in your traditional mode, as educators in research, informs your public persona and your public scholarship. But do you find—and this is very specific, because I’m thinking of your students—that those public pieces of who you are, as scholars, come into the classroom in any kind of way?

MSJ: We taught together a few years ago a course called Black Womanhood, and we were very intentional about taking down the walls around that course with our students by creating a digital syllabus and inviting folks to read along and comment along with us. We both taught on Twitter. So, I’m someone who, again—I think my students, they don’t need to know about me. They’re not that interested in me—and that’s okay. I don’t need that. But I do want them to come with me into some of these spaces to experience them, to know them, to see them, with my guidance, if you will, because they are optional spaces for someone of my age, but they are not optional for our students.

I have been eager to take students into these public spaces with me. Sometimes that means putting them in the car or on the plane or the train and coming to a conference. Sometimes that means getting them to sit in an audience, these days on Zoom. And some days it means having a conversation, a very public one, with them on Twitter about course material. Here, the metaphor is the lifting of the veil, right? Of how we work and how we produce ideas and who our communities of accountability are—and who the communities that are concerned about us are also. I try and take students with me.

JMJ: I try and do the opposite. I’m thinking of Maboula’s answer about a similar question, where she said, “I don’t play in the classroom. We don’t need to be that close.” I try and do the same thing. It’s a personality issue—Capricorn, box boundaries. I also recognize, though, that is not necessarily successful, that in the twenty-first century—and I agree completely with Martha—our students do need to have some skills for engaging with the public, and in particular ways, increasingly, as we don’t know what the post-Covid university will look like or academy will look like.

I do think they need to get the skills. I fear running into the same thing as Maboula. “Oh, you’re the fun, cool, chill, digital, smart professor.” That seems like a compliment. The #WhatDoesAProfessorLookLike. I tweeted at one point, “I’m always the grad student, even when I’m giving the keynote.” It’s interesting. You take your grace and your compliments where you can. But I think there are some ways of working with the tensions of the hierarchies of our positions that I am still trying to figure out and work out and that I think our students are also trying to figure out and work out and find guidance.

And so it may not be the best strategy to try and have a boundary. I don’t follow my graduate students on social media. Because I also don’t want them to think, “I have a thing that’s due for my professor. They’re looking over my shoulder,” and I want them to have the space to do that. We’ve talked about seminars—especially as Hopkins moves to this hybrid format. Should they be on Zoom or should they not be? We have seen amazing versions of events on Zoom—like this one. We have also seen less amazing versions like the SHEAR [Society for Historians of the Early American Republic] 2020 virtual keynote. So, what are the ways that our grad students, even as they are learning to be public scholars and they are learning the skills of public scholarship, also have the space to cloister—and not in the weird, nonsexual nun way, but in a way that’s like, “Hey, where can I have a safe space to think through my thoughts and do it with the guidance of somebody who has had these thoughts for years? Even if that somebody doesn’t know better, at least they have been doing this academy thing a little bit longer?” Those kinds of safe spaces can be really, really important.

I also find that there are graduate students, and our department is full of them, who are able to juggle and balance the weirdness of the hierarchy and the intimacy of the mentor/mentee relationship in really productive ways. And there are graduate students who just can’t, who can’t not transgress an intimacy. They are like, “You look young and Black and female. Why can’t we be friends? Why can’t we be sisters? Why can’t you be my electric Mammy?” Whatever it is, that’s the kind of interaction that I am trying to . . . not avoid but preempt, for the student’s sake. (Laughs.) It’s less for my sake because at this point I’m used to that kind of interaction.

It’s a weird balancing act. I’m sure they follow me. I know the Electricians of Electric.Marronage do, and I’m sure that they see all kinds of things. But when we get in the classroom, and we are in fields and we are in our meetings and we are in seminar, we’re here to work. They can bring in things that maybe they saw me tweet out, as in works and readings. But I have never had them bring in a conversation that was not related to the actual work. That is both a testament to the students that I have been blessed to work with and also probably has something to do with my weird proclivity for boundaries.

KLG: Boundaries are good and safe. We’re over time, so I am going to say thank you both so much for bringing this to such a beautiful conclusion, for being in dialogue with those who have been speaking over the course of these conversations. This is the end, technically, of #UnsilencedPast. But as I’ve said to you both, and to everyone who has been an interlocutor in this series, I see it as a robust beginning, a door opened for future collaborations and conversations. I hope you’ll take me up on it because it’s sincerely meant.