“I sit with Shakespeare and he rebukes me not.”
— W. E. B. Du Bois
“I am interested in…this process of entering what one is estranged from.”
— Toni Morrison
The Berkeley Institute is a community partner of the African American Intellectual Traditions Initiative (AAITI) at UC Berkeley.
Launched in Fall 2021, AAITI explores how African American intellectual and artistic work has related to, embraced or discarded the texts of classical education; these Black classical engagements hold incredible lessons about art, African American experience, American history, and what it means to belong in this nation and to the human community. AAITI celebrates and focuses our intellectual energies on this rich creative tapestry.
AAITI champions civility and creates vibrant and safe spaces for robust intellectual exchange. It challenges the reflexes to dismiss or reject important aspects of the scholarly past. And its programming challenges students to practice intellectual charity and scholarly discernment by making the perceived oppositions between classical and African American intellectual and creative traditions themselves objects of study. Such as:
Phillis Wheatley’s 1770s poems about the Bible and Greek mythology
the forceful 1860s petitions of newly-emancipated students at the Penn School in rural Florida wanting to study Latin alongside agriculture and domestic science
Ralph Ellison’s deep engagement with Dante, Homer, and Zora Neale Hurston in Invisible Man
Gwendolyn Brooks’s 1960s rejection of European poetic forms
Yusef Komunyakaa’s deeply Homeric poetry about the Vietnam War
Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s literary reconfigurations of Milton and the Beatitudes
Donika Kelly’s Greek myth-inflected 2021 book The Renunciations
Visit the AAITI website for more information.
AAITI is co-led by Chiyuma Elliott (Associate Professor of African American Studies) and Dr. Dena Fehrenbacher (UC Berkeley alum and executive director of the Berkeley Institute). Our core faculty include Dr. Chad Hegelmeyer (independent scholar and UC Berkeley alum), Steven Justice (Professor Emeritus, English, UC Berkeley), Katie Peterson (Professor, English and Creative Writing, UC Davis), and Matthew X. Vernon (Associate Professor, English, UC Davis).
For questions about the initiative, please contact Professor Elliott: chiyuma@berkeley.edu.
AAITI is sponsored by gifts from Boyd and Jill Smith and the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education.
Listen in.
Want a sample of the approach AAITI takes to African American art and its relationship with the classical tradition? The accompanying lecture was given by Professor Chiyuma Elliott at the Morningside Institute on Nov. 10, 2021, titled, “Classical Allusions in Contemporary African American Poetry.” More here.