Symposium: “‘Make a Poet Black and Bid Him Sing’: Modern Black Literature and the Vocational Call to Community” and “Diversifying the Philosophical Canon by Going Medieval”

St. Norbert College faculty will offer brief presentations on their scholarship and creative work related to diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. This hourlong session includes two presentations as well as time for Q&A; feel free to come and go as you’re able.

Note for faculty and instructors: If you plan to attend this session with a class, please register for yourself and all your students so organizers can have an accurate headcount. 

Deirdre Egan-Ryan (English) presents “‘Make a Poet Black and Bid Him Sing’: Modern Black Literature and the Vocational Call to Community”
Patrick Reyes’ recent book, The Purpose Gap, examines the ways that discussions about purpose and meaning have excluded communities of color whose stories of vocation resist the hero narrative so lauded by proponents of rugged individualism. Reyes suggests that this individualistic mode of storytelling has invisibly and dangerously been coded in terms of white power and privilege. In literary studies, modern black writers address this issue in rich and complex ways, as they frame stories of development that resist typical literary structures and instead propose a counter narrative of black communal vocation. This presentation demonstrates how much is at stake when considering vocation more expansively in black literature. Reading these influential writers together allows us to imagine how we might begin to close the purpose gap so all may flourish.

Eric Hagedorn (Philosophy) presents “Diversifying the Philosophical Canon by Going Medieval”
As has been widely noted, the standard canon of philosophical texts is overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male, and overwhelmingly European, a fact not unrelated to the racism and sexism of the 18th- and 19th-century writers who are responsible for creating the modern canon. Recent calls to diversify the philosophical canon by including more non-Western and non-male authors would benefit from paying closer attention to the largely forgotten and ignored medieval philosophical tradition, in which many of the most important voices were from Africa or central Asia, and in which women played a more important role than has often been recognized. Here I very briefly review a few of those important figures and their key contributions.
 

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