A Vanderbilt Associate Professor of English credits her Jamaican grandparents with nurturing her keen interest in uncovering the neglected histories of past generations, especially those of African and Caribbean descent, and preserving their stories for today’s learners.
Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo is the principal investigator and founding director of Voices from Our America, a project to advance cross-cultural and cross-generational understanding among the peoples of the United States, the Caribbean and Latin America.
"I developed a deep respect for my elders while growing up with my grandparents in Jamaica," Nwankwo said. "Without the stories that they told me, there is no way I would have become the person I am today." Of the more than 75 interviews recorded to date since interviewing began in 2007, about two-thirds focus on the experiences of individuals over the age of 65.
"Voices from Our America is one of the promising initiatives at Vanderbilt for transforming how humanities research is integrated into undergraduate and graduate education," said Jay Clayton, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English and department chair at Vanderbilt. "It highlights the relevance of field work to a literary discipline and demonstrates the value of a cultural approach to public issues today."
The project is focusing first on Panamanians of West Indian descent. "These are the descendants of Black British West Indians who came to Panama to work for United Fruit Company, to build the Panama Railroad, simply to find a better life, or, in the majority of cases, to build the seventh wonder of the modern world—the Panama Canal," Nwankwo said.
The workers were given both true and false promises about the opportunities that awaited them in Panama, particularly in the early 1900s. For example, workers in the Canal Zone, which was considered United States territory, suffered under the same Jim Crow segregation laws as found in some parts of the United States at that time.
"We use a standardized questionnaire, an approach that differentiates the project from traditional oral history," Nwankwo said. "However, the language of the questionnaire recalls ethnography, and the depth of the answers and insight into processes of self-fashioning that the questionnaire works to elicit is much more in line with what one would expect from an autobiography or a testimonial."
Questions range from memorable childhood experiences to deeper ones about how individuals express and enact their culture and history. Nwankwo noted that she recorded the first 35 conversations on video, which has been useful for showing interview clips at various workshops and events.
Lucius Outlaw Jr., associate provost for undergraduate education at Vanderbilt, spent three days in Panama this past summer documenting with his camera the project’s various components. Exhibitions of Outlaw’s photos with accompanying quotations and other material are planned for Panama as well as the Vanderbilt community as a prelude to more scholarly research and analysis of the project’s findings.
"Ifeoma’s research looks, in particular, at descendants of the people who were transported from Africa to the Caribbean region and later migrated to Panama," Outlaw said. "When the interview transcripts are completed, we will work to develop a ‘world view’ analysis of their thoughts and values and the evolution of their approaches to the world as they moved from one place to another." He said Nwankwo has provided a window on a group of people in the Americas who have received relatively little attention in the past.
The Voices from Our America project also has an active learning component. Information collected from the interviews is being packaged into forms that are the basis of collaborations with local organizations, community education events and curriculum development workshops for teachers. "We also plan to disseminate the information through scholarly articles, a book of interviews and a digital library," Nwankwo said.
The project’s team members include Panama Project Manager Nyasha Warren, a Harvard alumna who specializes in curriculum and community education; Veronica Forte, a university-level English as a Second Language professor; and KCB Consulting, a community outreach and development firm. Among the project’s local partners is the Society of Friends of the West Indian Museum of Panama. The first set of interviews was conducted at the group’s annual fair. Destiny Birdsong, a third-year doctoral student in English, serves as the project’s research coordinator.
Voices from Our America furthers the work of higher education institutions by linking research, K-12 curriculum development and community education. "The project embodies the emergent field of ‘public humanities,’ providing a distinctive way for Vanderbilt to take its place among other top universities that have embraced this burgeoning approach to understanding the humanities’ work in the world," Nwankwo said. "I am grateful for the support of the College of Arts and Science and to Provost Richard McCarty, whose support made the project’s enactment, especially in its first year, possible. I also want to thank the Center for the Americas at Vanderbilt, which provided a grant to help continue our work."
The second core part of Voices from Our America is called African American Worldviews. It focuses on indigenous U.S.-African American relationships with the world, particularly with the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean.
Nwankwo said that Americans’ initial complex reaction to Barack Obama demonstrates the relevance of the questions posed by the project. Having foreign ancestry and the affection of many people abroad became an issue during the presidential campaign. One reason was that the relationship between foreignness and being accepted as authentically black and authentically American remains unsettled in the United States.
Voices from Our America has a strong connection to the professor’s previous scholarly work on the historical and contemporary relations between black populations in the Americas. Her book Black Cosmopolitanism traces the historical differences between the peoples of the United States, the British West Indies and Cuba immediately after the Haitian Revolution with regard to the relative importance of racially-based approaches to self-definition.
Media contact: Ann Marie Deer Owens,
annmarie.owens@vanderbilt.edu