I!
N
S!
I!
G
H
T
IRAAS student Elizabeth
Sarah Ross ’16 recently
interviewed Professor
Marcellus Blount, Associate
Professor of English and
Comparative Literature at
C o l u m b i a U n i v e r s i t y.
Professor Blount was recently
named Director of Graduate
Studies of the Institute for
Research in African-American
Studies.
!What drew you to American
and African-American
literary and cultural studies?
As an undergrad I had no idea
that I wanted to go to graduate
school. Then when I got to
graduate school, I had no idea
that I wanted to get a PhD. I
went to graduate school and
really fell in love with my
seminars, with faculty, but
mostly with my cohort of other
students. I thought, I am not
clear about what I want to do
with the rest of my life, but
this is the space that I want to
be in. So, I end up getting a
Master’s in African American
Studies at Yale and then went
on to the PhD in American
Studies.
!H o w
did you become
involved with IRAAS?
I arrived at Columbia in the
fall of 1985. I was a young,
frail thing and I was faced with
the task of integrating the
English Department. There
were no African American
faculty when I arrived and
very few in the Arts and
Sciences.
For a time I was Chair of a
very small committee of
faculty [who] were able to
lobby for an African Studies
major. It was finally when we
were able to hire Dr. Manning
Marable that IRAAS was
founded. So, I am a part of the
pre-history of the Institute and
have always worked in
teaching in IRAAS, working
with students, and being
involved in programming.
!Y o u
have
coedited Representing Black
Men, and, more recently, you
completed "Listening for My
Name: African American
Men and the Politics of
Friendship." What did you
discover in this research?
In my work, I have discovered
that African American men
need to be liberated from
gender ideologies. Part of what
I do in looking at literature,
film, and other cultural texts is
to see what I call an
extravagant masculinity and
how we might deconstruct that
to achieve a sense of the male
interior. My work probes the
black male interior.
!Your
current project is a
study of issues related to race
and marriage equality. What
can you tell us about that
project?
What my project is arguing is
that we have to think about
sexual orientation differently
with respect to African
American culture. Looking at
marriage equality is a way of
my using a particular instance
to test my theory about how, in
fact, African Americans are
more progressive than we are
often told in the media. But,
the ways in which we express
our ideas about sexuality are
often times culturally specific.
The project that I am working
on is about language, so it is
connected to work that I’ve
done in the past, but it’s more
explicitly about social
institutions.