Dr. Smiti Nathan

Transcript

Smiti: [00:00:00]Welcome to Curiosity Meets the Past, a podcast for curious minds who love learning about the past. My name is Dr. Smiti Nathan, and I’m an archaeologist and your host. In this episode, I’m speaking with religious scholar Dr. Richard Newton. He’s currently a research professor at the University of Alabama, where his research focuses on scriptures and identity politics.

What I find really fascinating about Richard’s work is how he creatively combines different social theories and digital tools in his research. Richard can see connections that might not be apparent initially. In our conversation, we chat about a family scrapbook that catalyzed an entire research project.

Richard starts us off with the unexpected moment in which he was handed his family’s scrapbook, and what he saw when he first opened it.

 Richard Newton: The scrapbook kinda [00:01:00] came into my hands at a surprise moment. Like, I was downstairs in my house in the kitchen, and I don’t think anyone was gonna be up, so I was just, like, taking some time For myself, before the morning started, it was like Christmas time and I was in between both finishing my dissertation and going on the job market.

And so it was kind of this like very in between, like I’m in two worlds kind of place, and then I find myself back home in the kitchen. And my mom comes out, meets me in the kitchen, and brings me this book that she’s had that I’ve never seen before, I’ve never heard about it, and she was just like, “What do you make of this book?”

And it was this like crumbling book, and it had, you know, as I started looking through it, it had these like really interesting images, like Ripley’s Believe It or Not pencil drawing images about Black history in this kind of proto, early 20th century, like Africana Studies sort of way. And to be honest, when I saw it, I was stressing because I was like, I’m just trying to finish my dissertation on Alex Haley’s [00:02:00] Roots.

I’m trying to get done and focus and move on. Um, but like, okay, this is cool and interesting. Like I will take a look at this at some point. So there’s a part of me that’s like, I didn’t really want to deal with the book itself because I had so many questions that I knew I didn’t have the time to answer.

But also it was kind of like, here’s this cool thing that my mom’s bringing me that I had no idea existed. And it was interesting to have that moment where I was feeling kind of two different types of emotions of like wonder and stress, while also feeling in two places between finishing a dissertation and starting my career in a lot of ways.

Smiti: I can totally relate to that. I remember that time of finishing my dissertation, but also getting from family members different links to sites about archeology or different books that they read that they wanted to get my thoughts on. So I, I totally get that. But you did eventually look into the scrapbook and you found some interesting things.

Can you tell us a bit more about that?

 Richard Newton: Yeah. [00:03:00] So when I looked at the scrapbook, the pages were a mystery to me. I was not familiar with the series from which these newspaper clippings came. Joel Augustus Rogers’ Facts About the Negro, which was published in the Pittsburgh Courier in the early 20th century.

Really late 20th century, but it was a successor series to some previous newspaper serials. And Joel Augustus Rogers was this Jamaican journalist. He had emigrated to the United States in the early 20th century. He works as this freelance writer, but is also like a backpack rapper in his own ways. He’s like selling his own stuff, like he’s self-published, he’s writing his own work.

He doesn’t have a press, he doesn’t have a PhD, but he’s out here doing this interesting kind of lay history, amateur scholarship, one might say. And it’s this really, in the best way possible, pedestrian approach to history, like accessible for the everyday people. He’s contemporaries with W.E.B. Du Bois and so many other- [00:04:00] figures of early Black history, but he doesn’t have the credentials of the scholars that we often cite, and he’s out there meeting people where they are with these newspaper serials that are blending comics and also kind of factoids that draw from archives and museums to say like, “Hey, Black people have been out here for all of history and if you wanna understand human beings, you have to understand, uh, the facts about the Negro.”

And so I was looking through this and there are about 100 pages of these newspapers clippings, and each clipping has three little vignettes. So that’s 300 vignettes in this scrapbook that I later found that my grandmother actually collected and put together. Wow. And so the story of looking through the scrapbook was both learning more about Rogers and his facts about the Negro and also learning about the story about how my mom has this scrapbook assembled by my grandmother and no one knows about it.

Smiti: You know, what I found really interesting as I was looking through your family story and how you have [00:05:00] preserved this archive is that you have this way that history is understood through Rogers, but then you also see how it’s received by your grandmother and the notes she had in the margins. So there’s this almost duality of like, okay, well you have on one hand a person presenting this information and on the other hand a person receiving it.

How do you hold both of those as you make sense and essentially preserve this archive?

Richard Newton: So my academic training is in what I’ve come to call the anthropology of scriptures. And I use the phrase the anthropology of scriptures to talk about the cultural texts that people read but that also seem to read them back.

So a lot of times you’ll see people talk about scriptures as like the Bible or the Quran or fill in your favorite, quote-unquote, “sacred text” here. But really what I’m getting at with the anthropology of scriptures are the way that people are drawn to media and look at [00:06:00] media as taking a life of its own and even like speaking to them.

And you see this in Africana history with ideas of like the talking book, uh, but also in Christianity when Jesus Christ is literally like the word of God, right? Like this idea that there are texts that really do speak back to us and have agency in and of themselves. Now, I don’t actually think that texts have agency or media do.

I think there’s always a story about how people make these things mean- And meaningful to them. But when you do that, I think it brings out a sort of duality or a two-ness, to use Du Bois’ language, of recognizing that there’s a fine line between primary and secondary source. Like, really, the sources only matter in so much as they are a resource for people in a community and that they can do something with it.

Yes, I could look at Rogers and his clippings as, like, here’s an occasion to learn about this one author. But we also know that the author is dead, right? And that it’s all about the community that receives it, right? People can take whatever and make it, you [00:07:00] know, this is meme culture. And if you wanna understand the people who make the memes, that’s just as interesting as the original source of said media extract.

And I think both of those things are things worthy of attention because they’re both stories that tell us about how human beings work, our strivings, our passions, our problems, and the projects that we, we have to make sense of the world around us and our place in it.

Smiti: Gotcha. And you know, as you were speaking, I noticed you had some framings- Mm-hmm

to ground what could be very complex human behaviors and topics, like the anthropology of scripture, as you mentioned. Mm-hmm. But I also know in your work you use a term called data signification, and that seems to be a really helpful concept in making sense of the personal or maybe the more public and different scales of interpretation.

Do you mind chatting a bit more about that?

Richard Newton: Yeah. I’m happy to chat more about it at the risk of [00:08:00] people thinking I’m a fool for it, because I think it’s a, I guess, a pushback against a lot of the things that I’ve read and received in my studies and training. And that is, a lot of times people talk about signifiers in the academy or in scholarship.

And this is the idea that there are, like, sort of pieces of meaning that we encounter, you know, language, and there’s the stuff that we see, and then there’s the stuff that the things we see mean. And people wanna, like, separate those two things as, like, the signifier and the signified is what is talked about in classical terms.

I can see a stop sign, right? Like a red octagon, and then I can see, oh, red octagon means stop. Both of those things happen, we put them together. My thing, though, is when we talk about human beings, we’ve gotta keep people in the active voice, having agency, doing what they’re doing. Like, we have to watch people see the sign and say, “Oh, that’s a stop sign.”

And I wanna always tell that story. I often talk about this with my students in terms of actually drawing, like, a comic of the arguments or the observations they’re making, that [00:09:00] it’s hard to draw a ball rolling down the hill. You can draw Johnny kicking the ball down the hill, but like the passive voice, the ball was rolling, that’s a little bit more tricky to draw.

I want us to be able to be evocative with our words and our re-descriptions of what we’re seeing, because when you do, then we can start asking better questions about how human beings work. And I get at this by talking about data signification, because a lot of times people think, you see this in the news all the time, the data says.

The data doesn’t say anything. People use data to communicate certain things, and I always wanna keep in the foreground what people are up to. And I think in this day and age when it comes to data, we’re so fixated on big data, especially when talking about computers and technology, but small data is just as important.

The sort of big argument I make is that once you realize that there’s a lot going on with any particular datum, the question of scale works both ways. We can talk about big data and amassing all the different things that people are doing, trying to collect all that information [00:10:00] and make sense of it. You know, it’s like looking at space with a telescope.

But you can also take a microscope and look at a cell and zoom in, and you’re gonna see all sorts of things, right? Infinitely complex things in that scope. Same thing with a single datum. Same thing with the everyday things that human beings are up to, their sayings and their utterances and their books and scrapbooks.

You can zoom in on that and see how complex that stuff is. And for me, data signification is both the zoom in and zoom out about human complexity. We gotta take into consideration the big stuff and the small stuff.

Smiti: Gotcha. Thank you for that. That was very illustrative. And to just take that concept to the scrapbook at hand.

Mm-hmm. What are some big picture zoom out takeaways that you’ve had, as well as maybe some microscopic zoomed in insights that you have, especially any that might have surprised you?

Richard Newton: At first, I think I was really focused on the [00:11:00] question of where is Joel Augustus Rogers’ Africa, or his mythic Africa, as I put it.

And what I mean by that is he’s writing in this period when a lot of Black people have been taught to- frankly forget Africa. Don’t hold onto said mythic home because that’s not your place anymore. One, because you’re just busy trying to figure out how to fit into whatever diasporic space you’re in, right?

Like under emigration or slavery or colonialism or whatever it may be, like you’re trying to figure out your place in the world. So looking back and looking elsewhere doesn’t seem like that’s the move. But for Rogers, he’s making the argument that actually it is, not just for an individual person, but for us to understand human history, you’ve gotta look back and you’ve gotta see where people have gone.

And so I was kind of like, “Well, where is his Africa?” And so in the project, one of the things that I did with my students was we looked at sort of these 300 pages and we logged all the locations that he mentioned within this corpus, [00:12:00] and then we assigned coordinates to them that could plot using GIS, like where is his Africa?

And it turns out he’s like on every continent. He’s got stories and experiences that happen all over the place. And we did the same thing with the timeline, taking every date or historical event and logging those years, and then putting those on like a digital timeline. And he’s going from prehistory to not only his present day, but talking about, “Oh, in the few years, this person might be the first Black so-and-so.”

Like, he’s like forecasting into the future where he thinks history is going. And I find that really interesting in terms of this sort of zoom out big picture, because that’s what human beings do all the time. They’re always anachronistic. We are always playing with the past to tell our present story with the hopes that it’ll take us to a future.

And as much as we try to make sense of where we are in the present, we often look to the past to a home that doesn’t exist, right? There’s no place like home, and we take advantage of that in every possible way to make sense of who we are and where we wanna go. So I [00:13:00] learned that from Rogers just focusing on kinda how he tells the story of Black peoples, and to me that shows we have to be very conscientious about how we make sense of the ways that people talk about time and space to position themselves and each other.

Smiti: You know, you mentioned a bit about your project because, yes, you were handed this scrapbook and you started making sense of it, but you also made this resource that’s freely available online, and you mentioned that there’s a timeline, there’s a map, there’s scans of the pages, and after perusing your website, I know there’s a lot more.

Can you walk us through your kind of logic for sharing this data and why you decided to make it open?

Richard Newton: Yeah. I think in talking about data signification, one of the things that I was trying to get after from the sort of perspective of the humanities and social sciences, is that in a world where we talk about data so [00:14:00] much, data doesn’t just mean numbers.

Data means information that’s potentially interesting and useful for the observer, for the curious person. And- One of the things that sort of frustrates me in the, not just the academy, but in public discourse, is that we want ready-made answers We don’t wanna engage people on asking the questions and finding out for themselves, like, “What’s going on here?

What do we make of this?” as my mom asked me. And so for the website Decoding Diaspora, I wanted to not only give my take on what’s going on, but I didn’t wanna have the last word either. I wanted to invite people into asking with me, what do we make of this? Like, what do we make of this scrapbook? And give them all the same resources and tools that I have to make sense of this, um, so they can do that from their vantage point and see what they learn and what they find out.

Maybe I can learn and find out from them, too. And in so doing, I think we’ll find out about [00:15:00] each other and human beings. And so rather than being like, “Here’s my thesis on this subject,” I wanted to have the conversation that I so longed to have, and that is, “Let’s take a beat and figure out what’s going on here.

What do you see happening? What questions do you have? Here’s what I see happening. Here’s a question I have, and then let’s see what happens. Um, and let’s do it in a free way, but not behind a paywall, and with resources that almost anyone can access. Let’s remove all the barriers of entry so that we can let our curiosity run wild, and we can help each other in addressing it and developing it.”

Smiti: I love that. And you know, you were talking before about that line between primary and secondary resources, and one thing I hear from my audience a lot is the frustration of not being able to access primary resources and make sense of that for themselves. And I think you’re providing access to that, which is really cool, but also inviting that conversation.

And I’m curious, has there been anything that’s [00:16:00] surprised you as you’ve put this work online and made it available to a broader range of audiences?

Richard Newton: The biggest surprise is seeing the connection points for people. I’ve had so many conversations with people who’ve gotten interested in the project because as a kid they learned about Joel Augustus Rogers.

They came from families that were very interested in Black history, and so Rogers was, like, on the required reading list, because he’s such an accessible entry point into understanding Black peoples. I’ve had people from Ukraine and Russia who’ve identified with Rogers talking about figures from Russia and Ukraine, and making comparisons to things going on in the United States and elsewhere.

And they’ve talked about, “Oh yeah, I understand this reference he’s making or this story he’s making. We used to tell this story back home,” or, “This is from this history,” or, “I’m related to this person.” Like, things like this happen so often as they engage the project. And probably the most exciting thing [00:17:00] is, uh, as we had an exhibit of this project both online and actually on a campus museum here at the University of Alabama at, at Gorgas House, I had people in the community say, “I have a book that’s old and tattered, just like, you know, your grandmother’s or your mother’s scrapbook.”

Could you do the same thing with this book? It’s on different stuff, but could you do something with this?” And I’m like, “Absolutely.” Now there are the spinoff projects of using data signification on these other books that people have to see what can we learn from those stories. And, you know, honestly, that’s a dream come true, that people are getting involved, not just in thinking about Rogers as interesting, or my perspective as interesting, but in what they’re seeing as far more interesting than they first realized, and that’s all I could ever ask for and more.

Smiti: That’s amazing. And I’m noticing that there is a slight upward trend in folks scrapbooking more. Maybe those who desire to have something a bit more tactile to do and to preserve their family history or their [00:18:00] perspective on their family or experiences. So I think this project also speaks to an interesting current moment we’re at.

But I’m wondering, what has this project meant to you personally?

Richard Newton: I, I mean, I think the personal interest has changed over time. At one point it, it was making good on, uh, a promise to my mom that I would follow through and think about this once I finished the dissertation and the like. But it also became an avenue through which to connect or reconnect with family history as someone on this side of the liminal space that I was talking about earlier in my mom’s kitchen.

Like, when I was in my mom’s kitchen, I was between being a graduate student and starting my first job, right, a full-time job. I was on this side of having a full-time job with the opportunity to do this research, being a grownup, and now getting to ask myself, “Okay, well, what is my connection to my family as a grownup?”

Especially in light of the fact that I’ve had a lot of family members [00:19:00] die in the last few years, and that gets you thinking about who do you connect with and how do you connect with them. Um, COVID was a big part of that insofar as it became harder to connect to people because social distancing and all those things.

And my project actually was supposed to be a very different project. I was going to meet with an archivist to find a way to preserve the book, and the week that I was supposed to meet with the archivist, it was, um, when the global shutdown happened. And, and, like, I have an email that, that says something to the effect of, “Oh, once things get back to normal we’ll connect.”

Yeah. What is normal anymore? But, uh, needless to say, we haven’t reconnected, but, or connected. But digitizing the project was the sort of solution to that, or a stopgap measure to address that concern of the past going away. And so for me, it’s, it’s been an opportunity to- I don’t wanna say preserve the past, but to write the past, which is what we always do anyway, right?

That’s what [00:20:00] memory is about, is how can I write this story in a way that’s meaningful for me and for others going forward? Um, and that’s been the really personal thing about it. It’s been very manufactured insofar as I’ve had to use digital technology to manufacture this sense of human connection, right?

I have this scrapbook that I digitized. I took images and 3D printed them. I made a GIS map and a digital timeline. These are all very artificial ways, some might even say, like, ingenuine ways of trying to connect to family, which is supposed to be so visceral. But I think that’s sometimes all we have, and I think that’s certainly the case with diaspora.

And that’s maybe the biggest lesson that I’ve learned from all of this, is that sometimes we don’t get to connect with the ways we’ve been told connection happens, and so we have to come up with new and old ways to make those connections for ourselves and for the people we choose to care about.

Smiti: Absolutely. And I do appreciate how your project [00:21:00] forms connection or endeavors to form connection through various senses. You have the visual, you have the tactile, you have the auditory, just to name a few. So I think you’re doing a great effort in trying to engage folks and make those connections in ways in which people can receive them.

So in closing here, what do you hope listeners take away from our conversation about how this family scrapbook has played into decoding a diaspora?

Richard Newton: I, I think the big takeaway is- That the things you care about are the things you care about, and their interestingness is really up to how much you choose to stay curious and investigate them.

You know, studying scriptures, I’ve been told I need to study these particular [00:22:00] books in these particular ways with these methods. You know, doing field work looks like this. Writing and being a scholar looks like this. And while there’s something to be said for training, knowledge is something far broader.

And how can we use all the things that we’ve learned, and marshal those resources to ask better questions of ourselves and of each other, to me, is really what scholarship is supposed to model. And so I hope that people see this work as an invitation to do that, that it’s not about having the last word, but being eager to ask the questions and to listen better.

It also, to me, brings our attention to the stories that we’ve forgotten, and the people that we’ve overlooked or chosen to look over, and what do we do about that? What do we make of all of that, I think, is also a responsibility that we have, especially given all the digital tools and resources that are at our disposal.

What do we make sure to do so that we’re not disposing of each other in ways that [00:23:00] are, frankly, not humane and the worst of us?

Smiti: My biggest takeaway from this conversation is that what we choose to save and preserve reflects a lot about us, at least in certain moments. If you’d like to follow Richard’s work, you can find him on sowingtheseed.org, as well as social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.

Those will be linked in the show notes, along with a link to a full transcript of this episode. And if you’re curious to dig deeper and learn more about the range of media available on sowingtheseed.org, Richard shares that and more in a Patreon exclusive video. Our Patreon is free to join and gives you access to all of our extra content.

If you’d like to support the podcast monetarily, we’d of course appreciate that, too. Thanks so much for listening and cultivating your curiosity with us. We’ll see you [00:24:00] soon.

Credits

Dr. Danny Bate: Guest

Noor Hanania: Theme Music Creator

Laura Riveiro: Podcast Cover Art Creator

Brooke Norton: Production Support

Smiti Nathan: Host, Video Editor

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