Africana Research Collective Visits Louisiana

The Africana Research Collective, a group of faculty, students, and recent alumni, journeyed to Southern Louisiana for a hands-on research experience focusing on the intellectual and cultural history of the African diaspora. This was the collective’s second ever trip after an inaugural research excursion to the Dominican Republic in 2022. 

This particular trip was organized around the theme of “agency,” which can be tentatively defined as “someone’s or something’s capacity to produce an intended or unintended effect,” said Assistant Professor of African American Studies Garry Bertholf. This four-day, cross-institutional research collaboration brought together undergraduate fellows from Wesleyan’s Bailey College of the Environment Think Tank on “Agency” and the Center for the Humanities Colloquium on “Dead Reckonings” with graduate students from Duke University and Yale University.  

The collective explored the theme through different activities over the course of several days. For example, they co-organized an Africana salon with scholars from Yale University, Tulane University, and the University of Maryland. Their discussions explored the topics of “Historical Agency and Black Political Economy” as well as “Spiritual Agency and Jazz Improvisation.” The trip also incorporated a session of the Modern Language Association’s 2025 convention on “Visibility,” which happened to take place at the same time as the group’s trip. 

Bertholf said the discussions were especially rich since each of the students and scholars came to the excursion with different areas of expertise. Most of the students have studied some aspect of Black intellectual and cultural history, but they also brought different methodological perspectives from their training in fields as diverse as African American Studies, American Studies, English, Earth and Environmental Studies, anthropology, Neuroscience and Behavior, religion, art studio, and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, he said.  

“Together we created an awesome interdisciplinary space in and through which we sought to better understand the complex relation between human and nonhuman forms of ‘agency,’ a really capacious and sometimes elusive philosophical term that our group ultimately came to redefine for ourselves as an Africana Research Collective,” Bertholf said. “If we were a slightly different group of faculty and students, then our collective sense of the theme would have most probably been a bit different, depending on the specific disciplinary training and particular lived experiences of those involved in the research experience.” 

The collective also spent time reviewing the archives at local museums to get hands-on experience with important literary and artistic works. Bertholf brought the collective to one archive that contained many different kinds of cultural artifacts. At the Amistad Research Center, the group explored personal diaries and journals, incomplete and unpublished manuscripts, monthly calendars and weekly planners, family photographs and holiday cards, as well as utility bills and used typewriters. “In addition to the more ‘authoritative’ sources with which they are already familiar, I really wanted to expand our students’ sense of the archive to also include ephemeral materials and everyday cultural artifacts,” Bertholf said. 

“I came away from New Orleans with a newfound appreciation for getting the privilege of being in the company of archival materials,” Hannah Podol ’25 said. “Materiality is such a tangible way to understand the world around us, and I took great interest in the value of documents like ‘get well soon’ cards and receipts, things you would not find in textbooks or formal ‘historical’ documentation.”

They also visited the McIlhenney Tabasco Factory on Avery Island, located on a former plantation, and Whitney Plantation in Edgard, Louisiana. “Each site addresses the history of land and labor in a different way,” Bertholf said. “While the self-guided tour of the Whitney Plantation attempts to be intellectually and historically honest about its past, the self-guided tour of the McIlhenny Factory leaves much to be desired in terms of the deeper history of Avery Island.” This discrepancy sparked group discussions about silencing the past and the erasure of Black history.  

Graduate Research Fellow Yohely Comprés ’24, who is studying African American Studies, Spanish, and Portuguese at Yale, said the trip gave her the opportunity to see the different geographies and landscapes that enslaved peoples had to overcome when trying to escape their enslavement.