2018 Symposium

Toni Morrison’s gaze is intent—whether looking at who we are or where we have been, where we are going or who we might become. Toni Morrison's book, The Origin of Others

During this year’s Clifford Symposium, we at Middlebury will read Morrison’s most recent book, The Origin of Others, and engage one another in conversations about “the human project—which is to remain human and to block the dehumanization and estrangement of others.”

We will follow Morrison’s searing gaze into enslavement and its enduring consequences, and the use of color to define and demean. We will see her at the Vienna Biennale standing “face to face, unspeaking, looking into the eyes of the other” and experiencing an extraordinary intimacy. “Accepting each other—one to one.”

Morrison’s voice is as intent as her gaze. So we will also listen to her reading from her novel The Song of Solomon while teaching at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 1977. And we too will read aloud from The Origin of Others, her novels, and a short story adapted for the stage—attuning our voices to hers in an effort to grasp the richness of her prose and reach deeper into her story.

Toni Morrison’s imagination is vivid yet deeply informed. She spins stories that move back and forth in time, place, and perspective, never letting her readers settle long before forcing them to consider the issue at hand from another point of view, allowing them “an opportunity to be and to become the Other. The stranger. With sympathy, clarity, and the risk of self-examination.”

The liberal arts at its best.

Schedule of Events

Thursday, September 20

4:00–6:00 p.m.
Opening session
Wilson Hall, McCullough Student Center

Welcome
Professor Larry Yarbrough

Greetings
President Laurie Patton

4:30 p.m.
Keynote address I

Professor J Finley presents “‘Yonder they do not love your flesh’: Ghosts, Strangers, and the Specter of Race”

Toni Morrison’s The Origin of Others begins a conversation on the nature and shape of American racism, and how violence and brutality have become its daily doings. This talk takes as its starting point “Garner,” a shared surname spanning 158 years, between Eric Garner, who was viciously murdered by the NYPD in 2014 while selling loose cigarettes outside a beauty supply store, and Margaret Garner, an escaped slave who murdered her daughter rather than see her enslaved when the family was caught—the inspiration for Morrison’s novel Beloved. The notion of haunting and ghosts can be manifested in many different ways. While the specter, Beloved, haunts her family as a tangible presence—“a speaking, thinking dead child whose impact—and appearance and disappearance—could operate as slavery’s gothic damage,” the ghost of Eric Garner haunts the nation in ways that can seem central and peripheral all at once, summoning us to reckon with black men and women murdered in ghastly acts of racist violence.

Beyond a shared name, what do the stories of Margaret Garner and Eric Garner have to tell us about guilt, explicit or otherwise, in the perpetration of racial violence? This discussion will open the 2018 Clifford Symposium by beginning a frank conversation about race, Strangers, and Other ghostly matters Toni Morrison addresses in each chapter of The Origin of Others, specifically touching on several of Morrison’s most poignant and dangerous questions: “Why should we want to know a stranger when it is easier to estrange another? Why should we want to close the distance when we can close the gate?” Furthermore, how are unspeakable acts rendered mundane?

5:15 p.m.
Keynote address II

Professor Will Nash presents “Tending the Roots, Heeding the Call: Why We Must Read Toni Morrison Today”

In her essay “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” Toni Morrison powerfully illustrates the importance of knowing the past as one looks to the future. In The Origin of Others, Morrison herself speaks as the ancestor; we do well to listen in this moment to the wisdom she has channeled, accrued, and generated over five decades. Keenly attuned from the start of her writing life to the importance of speaking truth to power and chronicling and easing the pain of her community, she has consistently called her readers to account as makers of the American racial landscape. Always aware of the larger movements of history, Morrison stands equally focused on the impact that individual actors have on that history and on their peers. In our current cultural moment, when the escalation of racist thoughts and actions threatens to further rend the social fabric of our communities, when people stay silent out of fear of misspeaking or being misunderstood, when individuals believe themselves powerless in the face of “what has always been,” Morrison’s bold exploration and explanation of these questions offers us much-needed guidance toward deeper understanding and mutual respect.

7:30–9:00 p.m.
Evening session
Wilson Hall, McCullough Student Center

7:30–8:00 p.m.

Pre-screening talk on The Foreigner’s Home, led by producers Rian Brown and Geoff Pingree

8:00 p.m.

Film screening of The Foreigner’s Home

The Foreigner’s Home is a feature-length documentary film that explores the vision and work of Toni Morrison through The Foreigner’s Home, the 2006 exhibition she guest-curated at the Louvre. Morrison invited renowned artists whose work also deals with the experience of cultural and social displacement to join her in a public conversation that she had been pursuing for years through her own research and writing and in her teaching at Princeton University. The film expands that conversation, combining exclusive and unreleased footage of the Nobel Laureate in dialogue with artists—first, in Paris in 2006 and then, in 2015, at her home in New York state—with extensive archival film footage, music, and still images to present a series of candid and incisive exchanges about race, identity, “foreignness,” and art’s redemptive power.

Post-screening discussion led by the producers. For further information, see www.theforeignershome.com.

Friday, September 21

12:30–6 p.m.
Afternoon sessions

12:30–1:30 p.m.
Axinn 001

“Producing Documentary Film”: A workshop with the producers of The Foreigner’s Home

This workshop will feature Oberlin faculty members Rian Brown and Geoff Pingree. It will be coordinated by members of Middlebury’s Film and Media Studies faculty.

4:00–6:00 p.m.
Wilson Hall, McCullough Student Center

Addressing the Other: A Student Forum on Toni Morrison

Organized by Shatavia Knight ’20, Nia Robinson ’19, and Oratory Now Director Dana Yeaton. Middlebury students will read and respond to excerpts from The Origin of Others and Morrison’s other works. They will then open the floor for wider conversation in a variety of formats. The session will also include audio of Toni Morrison reading excerpts from The Song of Solomon, recorded live at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 1977, just before it was published to great acclaim.

7:30–9:00 p.m.
Evening session
Mahaney Center for the Arts Dance Theatre

Arts performance of an adaptation of Toni Morrison’s 1983 short story Recitatif

Created by Middlebury faculty members Michole Biancosino, Christal Brown, and Matthew Taylor, this performance treats the story of two girls who become friends despite the racial and social differences of their mothers. As they grow into women and mothers themselves, an old memory comes back to haunt them.

Immediately following the performance, the creators and performers will open a discussion of the challenges of staging Morrison’s unexpected treatment of race, color, and the coded language we use for both.

Saturday, September 22

9:00 a.m.–Noon
Workshops
Axinn 229

9:00–10:00 a.m.

J Finley and Will Nash present “Stories to Pass On: The Transformative Power of Narrating the Other”

In “Narrating the Other,” Morrison writes that the inspiration for Beloved came from a short clipping of a news story about Margaret Garner. Using the “origin” of Beloved as the jumping-off point for this workshop, participants will use the creative process to imagine their own lives in relation to the lives of strangers—the mundane stuff of everyday life that connects us all.

10:00–10:15 a.m.
Coffee break

10:15–11:00 a.m.

Matthew Evan Taylor presents “A Soulful Duet: Toni Morrison and Nina Simone singing the absurdity of the black experience in Song of Solomon and Mississippi Goddam”

Jazz and other musical forms play a prominent role in Toni Morrison’s novels; Jazz is the title of her 1992 novel set in Harlem of the 1920s—“The City,” she calls it. Morrison also refers to the influence jazz improvisation and performance has on the way she structures her writing. In this workshop, Matthew Evan Taylor, assistant professor of music, explores these aspects of Morrison’s work, comparing them to Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam,” written in response to pivotal moments in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

11:00 a.m.–Noon

Larry Yarbrough presents “Pulling It All Together”

Noon–1:45 p.m.

Lunch and Engaged Listening Conversations

Engaged Listening conversations over lunch will pick up on the morning’s workshops and conclude with previews of events that will take place through the year to take up and develop the symposium’s themes.

2:00–3:30 p.m.
Mahaney Center for the Arts, Dance Theatre

A second performance of Recitatif

THE GRILLE WILL BE OPEN FOR DINNER ON THURSDAY AND FRIDAY EVENINGS DURING THE SYMPOSIUM.

Presenter bios

J Finley

J Finley teaches courses focusing on black expressive practices, identity, feminism, and popular culture at Middlebury. She received her BA from Hampshire College and her MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Her current research looks at the history of black women’s humor, particularly how stand-up comedy has come to be a place where black women challenge and expand traditional narratives of resistance, redress, and feminist politics.

Will Nash

William Nash is professor of American studies and English and American literatures at Middlebury. He received his BA from Centre College of Kentucky and his MA and PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has taught at Middlebury since 1995. The author of Charles Johnson’s Fiction and coeditor of Charles Johnson: The Novelist as Philosophe, he has also published scholarly articles and reviews in African American Review and Callaloo. His current research explores individual and collective uses of scrapbooks in the movement to end American chattel slavery. His teaching interests include contemporary representations of African American enslavement and issues of space and place in 19th- and 20th-century African American culture.

Michole Biancosino

Michole Biancosino is a professional director, writer, and producer whose work has been presented in theatres all around New York City, regionally, and internationally. As the cofounding artistic director of the award-winning Project Y Theatre Company, she has developed and directed new work in Washington, D.C., in New York City, and internationally for 20 years. As the founder and producer of New York’s Women in Theatre Festival, she has presented and produced the work of over 150 women theatre artists. Biancosino is a recipient of the prestigious SDC Sir John Gielgud Fellowship for classical directing and has received numerous grants in support of her work.

Christal Brown

Christal Brown is the founder of INSPIRIT, Project: BECOMING; the creator of the Liquid Strength training module for dance; and the chair of dance and faculty director of MiddCORE at Middlebury College. She earned her BFA in dance and minor in business from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and her MFA in new media art and technology from Long Island University. Combining her athleticism, creativity, love for people, and knack for teaching, Brown continues to teach and create works that redefine the art of dance and the structure of the field.

Rian Brown

Rian Brown is an award-winning independent filmmaker, visual artist, and associate professor of cinema studies at Oberlin College. She grew up in Boston, studied visual art at Massachusetts College of Art, and received her Masters of Fine Arts in film from the University of California, San Diego. For the past two decades, she has written, produced, and directed many short films and documentaries focusing on women’s issues, social justice, and art. With Geoff Pingree, she cofounded in 2009 and currently directs the Apollo Outreach initiative, a media education program that works with urban youth in the Cleveland area.

Shatavia Knight

Shatavia Knight is a rising junior from Newark, New Jersey. She is pursuing a double major in economics and American studies, and serves as copresident of the Black Student Union.

Geoff Pingree

Geoff Pingree is an Emmy Award–winning documentary filmmaker, photographer, writer, and professor of cinema studies at Oberlin College. He earned both master’s and doctoral degrees in English and American literature and film studies at the University of Chicago and, before coming to Oberlin, worked in public television in Washington, D.C., where he also directed Catholic University’s Program in Media Studies and George Washington University’s Institute for Documentary Filmmaking. In addition to other collaborations with Rian Brown—most recently, The Foreigner’s Home—he cofounded and directs the Apollo Outreach Initiative, a media education and community outreach program housed in Oberlin’s historic Apollo Theatre.

Nia Robinson

Nia Robinson is a senior sociology major from Chicago. For her final year, she will be president of the Student Government Association, a manager at Crossroads, and a Senior Admissions Fellow. When she isn’t running around, you can find her writing poems, looking for postgraduation employment, or just trying to figure it out. Nia is excited for her final year and all it has to offer her.

Matthew Taylor

Matthew Taylor is assistant professor of music at Middlebury College. He is an award-winning composer and saxophonist whose music has been performed across the United States and Europe. He has also collaborated with visual artists and dancers on a series of graphic scores. He has been artistic director of such festivals as Vanguard Miami and Counter-Programming and is a board member and composer in residence with Festival Baltimore. His most recent project, New Century | New Voices, is a concert series in Middlebury celebrating the continued contributions of women and composers of color to the classical music canon.

Larry Yarbrough

Larry Yarbrough is the Tillinghast Professor of Religion at Middlebury. A scholar of the New Testament, early Christianity, and early Judaism, he is the author of Not Like the Gentiles: Marriage Rules in the Letters of Paul (Scholars Press, 1984), coeditor of The Social World of the First Christians: Essays in Honor of Wayne A. Meeks (Fortress Press, 1995), and editor of Passion: Contemporary Writers on the Story of Calvary (Orbis, 2015) and Engaging the Passion: Perspectives on the Death of Jesus (Fortress, 2015). The last two collections, which include essays by 16 Middlebury authors, began as one of the Scott Symposia Yarbrough organized at the College.

Dana Yeaton

Dana Yeaton is a playwright and teacher of dramatic writing and oratory at Middlebury College. His full-length drama Mad River Rising received the Moss Hart Award, and his musical Swing State, with composer Andy Mitton ’01, was a featured production at the New York Musical Festival. His most recent work for the stage is My Post-Traumatic Cruise Ship Cabaret, with music by the Grift. Yeaton is also director of Oratory Now, a program that trains Middlebury students to speak, listen, and coach their peers in all forms of oral expression.

Clifford Symposium