>> Anise Vance: Thank you guys for having me.
This is quite an honor.
Today I'm gonna be talking
about storytelling, trauma, and identity.
Those are three big topics, but I wanted to start
out with something a little bit more simple, my family.
This is my family.
My father's name is Anthony Vance,
African-American, he's Black.
He grew up in Hartford, Connecticut.
There's my sister.
She looks really young, she's actually 25.
She's older than me, and she's in law school right now.
There's me with a Gerry curl thing going on.
And there's my mother, her name's Laudan [phonetic] Vance.
She -- she appears White to many people,
but she's actually natively Iranian.
She came over to the US before the Iranian Revolution.
We bounced around a lot when I was a kid.
I was born in [inaudible], the Ivory Coast,
which is in West Africa, moved to Kenya, then Botswana,
and then finally graduated high school in Egypt.
Now being mixed race, and moving
around all the time was confusing --
to me, to everyone who saw our family, to our family itself.
My mom used to go into grocery stores with me and my sister,
and people would come up to her and be like thank you so much
for adopting these kids.
[ Laughter ]
>> Anise Vance: When I was in elementary school I used
to come home, and my grandmother
on my mother's side lived with us for a while.
I used to come home, and I used to look her dead in the eye,
and I used to say Grandma, you know I'm Black, right?
And when I was in Egypt, everyone --
every Egyptian I saw thought I was Egyptian.
So they'd stop me on the street
and they'd ask me for my directions.
And my Arabic was halting at best, so there was a point
in the conversation where I could no longer respond,
and people would literally yell at me.
You know, you're so stupid, how can you be so rude, da da da,
and all this other stuff.
So it was -- it was a very confused upbringing.
And when I came to Dartmouth, it's not like any
of this stuff went away.
In fact actually just a week ago I was walking around Aucum Pond,
just trying to clear my head, and there was an alum
who was walking his dog.
He was a '76 or '79, I forget.
And we got to talking, and then he asked me where are you from?
And, you know, I was just gonna give him the easy answer.
I was like most of my family lives in Boston,
that's where I call home.
And he said no, no, no, no, no.
With a name like Anise, where are you really from, right?
So -- so all these issues of identity kept on playing
out in my life, even at Dartmouth.
So I got intellectually obsessed with issues
of identity and place.
What creates us, and how other people view us.
So when it came time to write a thesis for junior year,
most people have a million things going through their head,
I just wanted to do one thing.
I wanted to talk about identity, and I wanted to talk
about it in a personal way.
So I went back to the place that my dad is originally from --
Hartford, Connecticut, particularly North Hartford,
Connecticut, which is predominantly Black now --
about 90 to 95% Black.
So I went, and I went there with the intention
of just talking to people.
I was doing historical and structural research as well,
but really the crux of it was these interviews
with community members.
Talked to them about the community, what it meant to be
from there, what it meant to be Black in North Hartford.
And the three things that kept on coming up over and over
and over again were narratives of violence,
narratives of confinement, and narratives of migrancy.
And what I mean by that --
what I mean by these things are several things.
By violence I mean not only physical violence
in which people underwent, you know, fights, domestic abuse,
or whatever it is, but also psychological violence.
There was what one interviewee descried the culture of ranking,
where people would sit out on the corner for hours at a time,
and all that would happen was that you'd trade insults over
and over and over again to try to prove who was best,
to try to rank yourselves, right?
That's psychological abuse, psychological violence.
By confinement, I mean not only geographic confinement.
Most people don't actually realize the extent
of the geographic confinement in the United States as a whole.
There were during, you know, the 50s and 60s, covenants --
literal covenants in suburbia
that said you can't sell to a Black person.
There were incidents of violence
if a Black person moved in next to you.
There was all this kind of stuff that would --
that made sure certain people lived in certain areas.
Now confinement can also refer to imprisonment,
which in North Hartford, as I'll talk about a little bit later,
is sky, sky high for Black men in particular.
The third thing is migrancy.
And these aren't only memories of migrancy from the north to --
or excuse me, from the south to the north in terms
of great migration, this is intracommunity migrancy.
Something that one
of the interviewees called invisible homelessness,
where say I'm living with my parents.
My parents split so I go to live with my dad
in wherever he's now living.
My dad maybe hits me so I go to live with a friend,
and my friend all of a sudden they can't make the --
the rent, so they get evicted, and all --
and, you know, this -- it just keeps on going on
and going on and going on.
And so you have this homelessness --
with a roof, but a homelessness nonetheless.
>> Anise Vance: So when I was trying to deal with this stuff,
there were two things that popped out to me.
First were that these stories were intergenerational.
It wasn't just the 20-year olds who were telling me this,
it wasn't just the 50-year olds, it wasn't just the 80-year olds,
it was everybody who was saying this.
The second thing was that this was all pervasive,
that regardless of whether you had actually lived through some
of this stuff or not, you had to live your life in reference
to it, because it was there all the time.
And so I struggled to come up with an idea
that actually encapsulated what was going on.
And the great thing about doing research as an undergraduate
or a graduate is that you're not out there by yourself.
So I was, you know, emailing and talking to my --
to my advisor professor, Richard Wright, and I was trying to --
I was coming up with all these crazy theories,
bodily consciousness, stuff like that
that just sounded ridiculous.
And he tells me -- he's like Anise you need to look
at an idea called post-memory.
Now post-memory was originally developed
by Professor Marianne Hirsch, who actually used to work
at Dartmouth a little while ago.
And it was applied to Holocaust studies.
What it -- what it describes is the relationship of a first --
of a -- a second or third generation to a first generation
that has experienced some kind of a trauma.
And it argues that a lot of identity --
a lot of how we constitute ourselves comes
from those traumatic experience --
experiences if we come from one of those communities.
Now let me give you a concrete example of what
that means in North Hartford.
And since, you know, I only have about 8 minutes,
I thought I'd tackle the really simple stuff, like slavery.
[ Laughter ]
>> Anise Vance: So this is an actual conversation I had
with -- there we go -- with one of my interviewees.
His name's not Tony [phonetic], I didn't put his name up there,
to protect his identity and all that.
So he says when you hear the word slave,
what image pops up in your head?
And I said Black.
And he says, see what I mean?
They've so effectively told us how to think and what to think,
the first image of slave that pops
up in our mind is ourselves, right?
Now we could spend hours on this one quote,
disentangling all the different things that he means by that,
but there's three things that he particularly pointed to.
He said one, out of all the histories of slavery
in the world, even in the United States,
we choose to only look at Black slaves.
And that's a highlighting element of post-memory,
of the way we creatively imagine our own history.
The second thing that he pointed to was that we make slaves
and Blacks synonymous.
It wasn't that a Black person was a slave,
that a Black person is a slave, right?
And that again is post-memory.
It's imaginatively creating what it is we essentially are.
The third thing -- and this is where post-memory gets
so troubling -- the third that he pointed to was
that the process continues, right?
So if you have -- imagine we invested in a history
and in a group, then you have to reaffirm that history in order
to be who you are, right?
So in North Hartford, in particular reference
to imprisonment, one of the --
one of the guys I talked to said imprisonment was a kind of right
of passage for young Black men.
It was what made them legitimate and credible
in certain communities in the area, right?
Now that's -- that's -- that's deep, one,
and that's also incredibly destructive, right?
So the question that we then come to is, is it possible,
and how do we interrupt post-memory?
Oh I love that graphic, there we go.
[ Laughter ]
>> Anise Vance: And to answer that I went
to the community itself.
And there's a school in the community called Jumoke Academy.
It's an elementary and middle school.
It's scoring higher than all of the suburban schools,
which is incredible for an area that is so impoverished,
an area that has experienced so much trauma and suppression.
So I went there and I talked to them about, you know,
what it is -- what -- what are you guys doing?
How are you guys creating success
in this school and in this area?
And the principal told me okay, you know,
we have all the structures, we have all the tools,
we have great teachers, and all this, but we also surround them
with continual -- continual positive encouragement.
They've done all kinds of stuff.
They have made up awards to give to students
who are doing poorly, so the students feel a sense
of validation, invited the student's parent
in so the parent has a positive experience in the school,
and all of a sudden this turns things around.
This is the first time in anyone's memory
that somehow school is a positive thing,
that somehow you're telling these kids
that they can actually -- and they should succeed,
not despite of their identity, but based on their identity.
When I went to the school it was incredible.
I looked around every corner,
and there was Barack Obama everywhere.
I'd never seen so much Obama --
pictures of him up on all the walls.
And, you know, I -- and I'm not that political
of a person, but I noticed this.
And so I asked the principal, did you guys put these
up yourselves as positive encouragement?
And he was like no actually, the kids put these up, alright?
And I was thinking this is -- this is incredible.
You know, they don't know anything about policy,
they don't know anything about, you know, any of the kind
of political shenanigans that go on.
But all these see is a narrative
that disputes what they have seen in their own community,
and they latch onto it.
They are empowered to then refute a story,
and create their own.
Now if that isn't empowerment, I really don't know what is.
Thank you all very much.
[ Applause ]