The Art of Remembering and Making a Way: Going There, Knowing There, and Other Curious Lessons From “The Genius of the South”

ABSTRACT How do we imagine the future, especially in our current moment? This keynote encourages us to consider lessons learned and shared by those who have gone before us. This includes a giant of our discipline, Zora Neale Hurston, whose praxis challenges us to be present and to listen and learn from another vantage point. Listening informs our praxis. In this keynote, I share ways that listening has propelled entry into new spaces of inquiry, activism, and being through direct engagement, such as the Black Cemetery Network. It is surprising what we learn when we listen. When people speak, we generally hear them, but it is when we listen that we learn. Our narrator, our teacher, can be a hidden gravesite, a toxic waste site, a racial trope, an elder's story, a youth's imagination, a river flowing or an ocean current; a breeze, a poem, a song, a sigh, a laugh, a drumbeat, a quilt, a basket sewed with love, or rice recipes shared with pride; soothing hands and calloused hands; a familiar smell or taste for a special dish cultivated over generations and handed down through ways of being and knowing. The call and response to, are you listening , is we hear you ; we feel you; we connect in this moment with what you are sharing. This connecting and remembering is our charter as human beings and as practitioners. These are our boldest moments to shine our brightest light as anthropologists, as people enmeshed in the public sphere. This keynote amplifies what can be learned, shared, activated, and acted upon from our listening on multiple levels and across multiple sectors and registers. This is a call to action to accept the mantle and the charge as living legacies of Zora Neale Hurston, to center our human beingness in the many ways that we have been positioned to make a difference.