Southern Black women’s novels are replete with landscape histories. Their characters navigate palimpsests of emotional geographies, cultural exchanges, and migratory experiences as they travel, settle, make homeplace and cultivate community. In Butler's English classroom, centering Black women’s narratives of place fosters the exploration of marginalized and contested histories. They honor these Black women’s praxes as culture bearers and placemakers, recovering maps to belonging they have fashioned across diaspora, so that we might carry their methodologies into the making of freer futures for those in our present day communities. Her students go on to visit places near and far with a more complex understanding of what, and who, makes a place. In this talk Butler will discuss several ways she teaches in place: through site visits with her students, through mentorship of students preparing for travel research, and through facilitation of community engagement by student researchers.
Maia L. Butler (she/her/s) is Associate Professor of African American Literature at UNC Wilmington and affiliate faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies. She is a literary geographer centering Black women’s literature and feminist theories within African Diasporic and Anglophone Postcolonial studies. She is the Co-founding Vice President of the Edwidge Danticat Society, co-editor of Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat (2022), and has chapters in Bloomsbury Handbook to Edwidge Danticat (2021), Approaches to Teaching the Work of Edwidge Danticat (2019), and Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era (2019).