Visiting Keohane Professor to Explore A Severed Relationship to Land

Ashon Crawley’s art focuses on reconnecting people to place

Ashon Crawley in his studio.
Ashon Crawley in his studio.

Black people’s severed relationship to land, water and air must be recovered for a thriving and joyful life, suggests artist and scholar Ashon T. Crawley. He asks, “Is there a wisdom, a thought practice, an approach to making things that lets us work against this severance, and prompt in us a way to move, think, and do otherwise?”

“All my writing and my approach to art practices is about what I call otherwise possibility,” said Crawley, who has been appointed the Nannerl Keohane Distinguished Visiting Professor at Duke and UNC Chapel Hill. He is professor of religious studies and African American and African studies at the University of Virginia.

As the Keohane professor, Crawley will engage with students and faculty on both campuses and give three public lectures: Oct. 23 at Duke, Jan. 29 at UNC, and a third in spring 2025. The lectures will cover the theme of, “Otherwise, We are Down South Folk—Dirt, Water, Air.”

A Duke alumnus, Crawley holds a Ph.D. in English. His research and teaching experiences range from Black studies, performance theory, sound studies, philosophy and theology to Black feminist and queer theories.

Ashon T. Crawley, HOMEGOING, Washington Monument – South Grounds: a sonic memorial to the AIDS crisis that honors fallen Black queer musicians and spirituality (Photo: Steve Weinik)
Ashon T. Crawley, HOMEGOING, Washington Monument – South Grounds: a sonic memorial to the AIDS crisis that honors fallen Black queer musicians and spirituality (Photo: Steve Weinik)

His work has been featured on the National Mall in Washington, DC, at Second Street Gallery and Welcome Gallery in Charlottesville, and at Bridge Projects and the California African American Museum in Los Angeles.

Crawley is the author of “Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility,” (Fordham University Press) an investigation of aesthetics and performance as modes of collective, social imagination, which received the 2019 Judy Tsou Critical Race Studies Award from the American Musicological Society.

His second book, The Lonely Letters,” (Duke University Press) is an exploration of the interrelation of Blackness, mysticism, theology and love. It won the 2020 Believer Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2021 Lammy Award in Nonfiction.

Crawley has received arts fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, New City Arts, and Learning It Together (LIT). Currently, he is working on a book about the impact of the AIDS crisis on Black social life.

Down South Dirt

Crawley will speak at 5:30 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 23, at the Nasher Museum of Art. In this opening public event, he will speak on the theme of dirt and soil to the making of Black life, and how degrading the earth is part of the attempt to unmake Black possibility. Thinking through “Cancer Alley” in Louisiana and soil erosion in Mississippi, what practices are available to help us conceive life otherwise?

“In the Americas, the ports and parts were primarily southern, down south, before such a concept even existed. The port is the meeting place of dirt, water and air through architectural design. … Is there an approach to making things that not only lets us notice but lets us work against the continued antiblack racist imposition that severs us from dirt, water and air?” Crawley said.

In his interdisciplinary practice, Ashon Crawley will present work—from visual and sonic art to fiction and prose—arguing that a relation to land, water and air must be recovered for a thriving and joyful life.

“This does not mean that Black people have not survived, nor thrived, that we have not enjoyed, nor had joyful lives. This does mean, however, that the thriving and enjoyment that has happened has occurred within the crucible and context of the epistemology of severance, forced separation, imposed and maintained by violent force,” Crawley said.

About the Keohane Professorship

The Nannerl Keohane Distinguished Visiting Professorship brings prominent scholars to UNC Chapel Hill and Duke for a one-year period, during which they deliver a lecture series and engage students and faculty around areas of shared interest to both institutions.

Created in 2004 by James Moeser, who served as UNC’s chancellor at the time, the professorship recognizes Keohane’s contributions during her term as Duke’s president and seeks to strengthen the collaboration she and Moeser built between the two institutions.

The professorship was funded by the late Josie and Julian Robertson (parents of Spencer Robertson, Duke ’98, and Alex Robertson, UNC ’01) and the William R. Kenan, Jr. Charitable Trust.

Last year’s recipient was Brett Ashley Kaplan, director of the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.