Nijah Cunningham
Compelled by the power of what Toni Morrison calls “cross-genre pollination,” Dr. Nijah Cunningham, Lecturer in the Council of Humanities, African American Studies, and English, and Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows, stages interactions among literary texts, theoretical and philosophical works, and art objects. He approaches black aesthetics as an open field, one that takes shape through dialogue between art forms. His students must contend powerfully with not fully knowing what it is they are studying; black aesthetics, in his words, is a “living concept.” As he explained during his program at the McGraw Center on September 26, 2018, Dr. Cunningham grapples with the question, what can we do with artworks in our classrooms that we couldn’t do without them? He described specific exercises through which he teaches students to look slowly: by freewriting, by pausing during class to ask his students to look again, by demanding honesty in describing what they see, by asking questions about form rather than content, and by asking his students to “look sideways” – to view an art work alongside a poem or work of philosophy. Introducing art works into his classroom allows him to stretch the boundaries of literary studies – and allows his students to generate new knowledge.
