In October, the Greater Princeton Branch of AYLUS (GPA) collaborated with many other branches for the newest edition of newspapers to promote youth volunteerism. Editors across the country worked together to have this newsletter published on a monthly basis. Besides the AYLUS announcement, the two-page newsletter covers unique volunteering activities at nationwide branches. We expect this monthly newsletter to help improve communication among AYLUS members nationwide and advocate for the concept of community service wherever it applies.
Editor-in-Chief: Lana Cheng (10/1, 3 hrs; 10/11, 3 hrs; 10/13, 3 hrs)
Advisor: Cassie Wang (10/1, 3 hrs; 10/11, 3 hrs; 10/14, 3 hrs)
Deputy Editor-in-Chief: Catherine Feng (Art: 10/13, 3 hrs), Kathie Wang (10/6, 3 hrs), Brenna Li (10/6, 3 hrs)
Art Editors: Daniel Feng (10/13, 2 hrs), Danica Xiong (10/13, 4 hrs)
Article Editors (10/1, 2 hrs for all): Alyssa Jin, Amy Wu, Brigitte Shi, Catherine Harman, Claire Tang, Emma Liu, Gina Shen, Jerry Chen, Luna Chen, Megan Wang, Meiqi Tan, Parker Liu, Sophie Liu, Tom Purui Cui.
AYLUS Times Advisor & National Honorary President Cassie Wang (10/4, 3 hrs; 10/18, 3 hrs; 10/22, 3 hrs https://illo2023.columbiaspectator.com/) continues volunteering at the Columbia Daily Spectator as the Senior Illustration Editor.
OPINION | RACE AND PLACE
How my grandmother’s art inspired me to pursue an Afrocentric Ph.D. in theater and performance studies
By Cassie Wang / Senior Staff Illustrator
BY LAUREN STOCKMON BROWN
Joyce, affectionately known as Joi, was the fourth child of six, born on October 6, 1941 in Indianapolis, Indiana. She was a stellar student who excelled in writing and loved singing, track and field, and drawing, particularly pictures of faces. Her first job after high school was as a waitress. She later worked in the United States Army’s finance center, where she learned keypunching. Upon graduating from college, she moved to the Los Angeles Westside, where she began her promising career as an entrepreneur. Before launching her business, Joyce handcrafted leather handbags and jewelry, which she sold every Saturday morning on the corner of Vermont Avenue and 85th Street. Her tenacity and hard work culminated in the grand opening of her first store, Miss Etc., circa 1972. She was one of the first few Black female entrepreneurs and artists based in the Westside of Los Angeles who also used creative expression as a form of storytelling.
I am Joyce Brown’s granddaughter, and I am the founder of My Colorful Nana.
MCN is inspired by my own experiences of being an African American girl in a suburban, predominantly white school district for the first 18 years of my life. As a child, I grappled with a sense of inadequacy rooted in the darker tone of my skin color and the kinkier texture of my hair.
Before founding MCN in the spring of 2018 in an oral history course, I remember visiting my Nana and digging through her old storage boxes. Here, I stumbled upon a wrinkled and stained photograph from 1963. In this photo, my Nana was around my age and sported a crisply cut and wonderfully curly afro. I stared at her collection of kinks that resembled mine, and I gradually found myself wanting to look like her.
My Nana and I started exchanging stories about the difficulties we have with our hair—the psychological and emotional weight that hairstyles like the “afro” can bring when living in a Western context that systemically promotes Eurocentric beauty standards via various forms of media representation and repeated educational and political practices. However, my Nana’s late 20s and early 30s were spent living among the “Black is beautiful” movement of the 60s and 70s, a time of cultural embrace and pride rooted in a radical Black revolution. She loved recalling one particular story about the revolutionary aspects of her early 20s—one day, her boss told her to change her hairstyle to embody a more suitable, appropriate shape and texture before going into work the next day.
Looking at me, she finished up her story, laughed, and said, “And you know what I did?”
“What, Nana? What did you do?” I replied, smiling lightly.
“I would show up with my big afro anyways, sit right down, and get to work.”
I remember envying her pride. I wondered what it might taste like.
Although we laughed, there was a sense of sadness that lingered between us, a wordless acknowledgement that a single African American woman’s struggle with her hair and other visible forms of self-expression speaks to a conflict that is still a reality for most Afro-descendants spread across the world. In my own thinking about this story, I ultimately came to realize that my Nana seemed to explore the complexities of this “struggle” through her art—the pointed faces she depicted, her subjects’ intense stares, or the everyday objects she crookedly pasted onto the canvas. My favorite paintings of hers are those that illustrate how connected chaos is to our natural state. As a result, I am extremely passionate about reimagining and celebrating self-expression through the lens of Black hair.
The pursuit of an Afrocentric doctorate topic came together organically. While attending New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, my interests in exploring racial theory and media studies continued to blossom. In time, I became deeply committed to the process of taking an interdisciplinary approach to exploring critical global issues. Scholars, part of an international roster of researchers from across NYU and New York City, trained me in courses highlighting the politics of visual arts, innovative education practices, and language teaching.
MCN sparked and led my path towards earning my doctorate. This creative and intellectual process began as a playful idea inspired by my undergraduate career and the time I spent organizing podcast episodes, intimate conversations, and poetry pieces for NYU’s radio club, housed in the basement of one of their first-year dormitories. More specifically, it is a creative community engagement tool inspired by my grandmother, Joyce Brown. MCN is a collective of “Generous Thinkers” that creates space for discussions on self-expression. We celebrate individuality, “beauty,” and Black hair as an educational and creative platform that encourages our listeners to define “identity” on their own terms.
To satisfy my craving to expand conversations on self-expression and community engagement, I used MCN as the pillar of my application for the Fulbright U.S. English Teaching Assistant Program. Nearly a year later, I called my Nana to share my excitement about teaching English as a second language while continuing my research on the artistic and political role of Black hair, pan-Africanism, and cultural expression for the My Colorful Nana podcast.
A few years after graduating from NYU, I packed my bags for Dakar, Senegal, mentally preparing myself to reconsider the collective nature of expression in environments outside a Western context. For example, in one MCN episode, “Believe in Your Natural Power,” I excitedly interviewed Korka Sall, who holds a doctorate in English literature and taught me how imperative it is for individuals to be able to confidently operate in multiple cultural frameworks. Korka intellectually plowed through an hour-long conversation that was rooted in two specific ideas—one, that there is beauty in choosing to shield aspects of our identity, and two, that there is growth in choosing to open our minds to other modes of thinking and feeling. Gently, her genuine belief in creativity as a form of healing pushed me to reconsider the limits I place on my own understanding of self-worth and cultural expression.
Even after all these years, I at times doubt the relevance of Black hair—and then I meet someone as exuberant as Korka Sall. While I was navigating a new culture and country, Korka’s cognitive and emotional openness cradled the part of me that felt scared. The generosity of her mind and behavior buoyed my flickering insecurities. Sitting face to face in a large room that echoed throughout the West African Research Center, Korka and I delved into a discussion that shed light on the intricate ways that studying Black hair can be a tool to help us to reckon with the complexities of our existence and to examine modern conceptions of Black hair as the root of pan-Africanism.
In this moment, the complex relationship between theory and practice housed in academic institutions, coupled with my Nana’s personal narrative as an entrepreneur and an artist, became apparent. In the mid-20th century, Nana swiftly moved through American social and economic paradigms that tend to dissuade us from accessing our most fluid selves. For these reasons, it is necessary to both broadly and closely examine the impact and decisions that led Nana to go to work with her natural hair, against the direct orders of her “superior.”
In simpler terms, Nana was a fighter, a painter, and a visionary in her own right. She demanded that the people around her “let her flow.” She made sense of patterns, textures, and muted colors that brought light and disruption to widely “accepted” ways of thinking—habitual forms of questioning or acting that typically stem from historically marginalizing and exploitative practices.
Like my grandmother, I have difficulties accepting the realities of a career that is closely interwoven into this idea of structure and precision as a means of achieving “success.” However, if I think more thoughtfully about Nana’s passion for “creating,” I can easily see how her intricate strokes of pink, red, and purple are inserted onto the canvas in methodical ways. Her artistic techniques seem to reflect harsh and gentle brushes that could only be mastered through disciplined action and long evenings devoted to training.
All this to say that choosing to pursue a doctorate in a seemingly controversial field like theatre and performance with a focus on race and ethnicity studies may lead to the same continuous questions: “What do you want to do in the future?” “What can you do with a degree like that?” and “What technical skills are gained in this role?” Yet, the strength, the resilience, the hope I encountered in my Nana’s story has empowered me to “stake my place” at Columbia as I craft an Afrocentric dissertation topic centered on brilliantly-spoken dramaturgs, literary wizards, and deeply reflective historians.
My Colorful Nana took me down this path, and I’m excited to continue falling deeper into it. Our work has lived in the public sphere for over five years and has faced many identity crises and silent moments of rest and reflection. Through our audio episodes and research-related practices, we have consistently connected ideas of self-expression to critical global challenges and innovative forms of education.
I bask in gratitude for having the opportunity to pursue a doctorate at Columbia, and welcome the challenges that may naturally arise as I continue to progress in my career as an artist and an academic. Gradually, I have realized that in whatever chapter of life we are navigating, it may be difficult to chase unconventional goals. But I hope that, in doing so, you can taste the pride that I sought once I saw that picture of my Nana.
It is difficult for me to piece together an ending for this article as my personal, creative and intellectual journey is very much an ongoing process. However, I am inspired by the words that Robin Kelley writes in his text Freedom Dreams, The Black Radical Imagination: “My point is that the dream of a new world, my mother’s dream, was the catalyst for my own political engagement.”
Similar to Kelley, I am inspired by my family’s imagination, and my grandmother’s art is the catalyst for my own intellectual engagement. Perhaps there is someone in your own life who has inspired you to “dream of a new world.”
Lauren is a doctoral candidate of theater and performance in the English and comparative literature department at Columbia and founder of My Colorful Nana.
To respond to this op-ed, or to submit your own, contact opinion@columbiaspectator.com.