GLAM: Guest Lectures in American studies Münster

Discipline and Resistance at Historically Black Colleges and Universities: Anti-Individualism in Alice Walker's "Meridian"

Dr. Abigail Fagan

This talk thinks with Walker’s representation of the tension among individuality, community, and the university in order to address a long history of student activism at historically Black colleges and universities in the United States. It asks: What can we learn from Black student activism of the 1920s and 1960s, in particular? What critique of individualism do "Meridian" and students’ archival documents offer us? Do these texts imagine alternatives to a social system that has since come to promote hyperindividualism?