Michelle D. Commander

Last updated
Michelle D. Commander
EducationPhD, University of Southern California
OccupationAuthor and Historian
AwardsFulbright scholar
Website https://www.michelle-commander.com/

Michelle D. Commander is a historian and author, and serves as Deputy Director of Research and Strategic Initiatives at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. [1] [2]

Contents

Education

Commander received her BA in English from Charleston Southern University and completed a M.S. in Curriculum and Instruction at Florida State University before completing a MA and PhD in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. [3]

Career

Before joining the Lapidus Center, Commander worked as associate professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee. [4] She serves as faculty for Rare Book School, [5] and is an author at Ms. Magazine. [2]

Commander served as consulting curator and literary scholar for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Afrofuturism period room, Before Yesterday We Could Fly , which opened in November 2021. [6] [7] [8]

Scholarship

Commander's work focuses on slavery and memory, diaspora studies, literary studies, Afrofuturism, and Black social movements. [3] Her publications include Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic (Duke University Press 2017), and Avidly Reads Passages (NYU Press 2021). She is editor of Unsung: Unheralded Narratives of American Slavery & Abolition, an anthology of Black history spanning transatlantic slavery to Reconstruction. [9] Her focus on Black mobility, slavery, diasporic longing and speculative futures is evident in her influence on Before Yesterday We Could Fly at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. [10] [11]

Awards

Commander is a Ford Foundation scholar and is the recipient of a Fulbright grant which funded teaching and research in Ghana in 2012-2013. [4] [12]

Related Research Articles

University of Southern California Private university in Los Angeles, California

The University of Southern California is a private research university in Los Angeles, California. Founded in 1880 by Robert M. Widney, it is the oldest private research university in California.

Arturo Alfonso Schomburg Puerto Rican historian, writer and activist

Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, was a historian, writer, collector, and activist. Schomburg was a Puerto Rican of African and German descent. He moved to the United States in 1891, where he researched and raised awareness of the contributions that Afro-Latin Americans and African Americans have made to society. He was an important intellectual figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Over the years, he collected literature, art, slave narratives, and other materials of African history, which were purchased to become the basis of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, named in his honor, at the New York Public Library (NYPL) branch in Harlem.

Afrofuturism Cultural aesthetic and philosophy

Afrofuturism is a cultural aesthetic, and philosophy of science and history that explores the intersection of the African diaspora culture with science and technology. The term was coined by Mark Dery, a white American Cultural critic in 1993 and explored in the late 1990s through conversations led by Alondra Nelson.

Charleston Southern University Baptist university in South Carolina, U.S.

Charleston Southern University (CSU) is a private Southern Baptist university in North Charleston, South Carolina. It was founded in 1964 as Baptist College.

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Public library in New York, New York, USA

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is a research library of the New York Public Library (NYPL) and an archive repository for information on people of African descent worldwide. Located at 515 Malcolm X Boulevard between West 135th and 136th Streets in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, it has, almost from its inception, been an integral part of the Harlem community. It is named for Afro-Puerto Rican scholar Arturo Alfonso Schomburg.

Wangechi Mutu Kenyan sculptor

Wangechi Mutu is a Kenyan-born American visual artist, known primarily for her painting, sculpture, film, and performance work. Born in Kenya, she has lived and established her career in New York for more than twenty years. Mutu's work has directed the female body as subject through collage painting, immersive installation, and live and video performance all the while exploring questions of self-image, gender constructs, cultural trauma, and environmental destruction, as well as notions of beauty and power.

Black science fiction Science fiction involving black people

Black science fiction or black speculative fiction is an umbrella term that covers a variety of activities within the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres where people of the African diaspora take part or are depicted. Some of its defining characteristics include a critique of the social structures leading to black oppression paired with an investment in social change. Black science fiction is "fed by technology but not led by it." This means that black science fiction often explores with human engagement with technology instead of technology as an innate good.

Pedram Khosronejad Iranian anthropologist (born 1969)

Pedram Khosronejad is a socio-cultural and visual anthropologist of contemporary Iran. He is of Iranian origin and commenced his studies in Painting and in Visual Art Research before moving to France with a PhD grant in 2000. He obtained his D.E.A. at Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and obtained his PhD at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris). His research interests include cultural and social anthropology, the anthropology of death and dying, visual anthropology, visual piety, devotional artefacts, and religious material culture, with a particular interest in Iran, Persianate societies and the Islamic world.

Hannah Beachler is an American production designer. She worked on the 2015 Rocky film Creed, the Miles Davis biopic Miles Ahead, and most recently has become known for the film Moonlight, Beyoncé's 2016 TV special and visual album Lemonade, and for her Afrofuturist design direction on the film Black Panther, for which she won an Academy Award for Best Production Design. She was the first African-American to be nominated in the same category, as well as the first to win.

<i>The People Could Fly</i> Collection of 25 American Black folktales published in 1985

The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales is a 1985 collection of twenty-four folktales retold by Virginia Hamilton and illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon. They encompass animal tales, fairy tales, supernatural tales, and tales of the enslaved Africans.

C. Riley Snorton is an American scholar, author, and activist whose work focuses on historical perspectives of gender and race, specifically Black transgender identities. His publications include Nobody is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. Snorton is currently Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago. In 2014 BET listed him as one of their "18 Transgender People You Should Know".

Hanna Reisler is an Israeli-American Professor of Chemistry at the University of Southern California. She is interested in the reaction dynamics of molecules and free radicals, as well as the photodissociation in the gas phase. Reisler established the University of Southern California Women In Science and Engineering (WISE) program.

Amir George is an American filmmaker, artist, and curator. He is best known for Black Radical Imagination an international touring experimental film program he co-founded with Erin Christovale.

Jenn Nkiru is a Nigerian-British artist and director. She is known for directing the music video for Beyoncé's "Brown Skin Girl" and for being the second unit director of Ricky Saiz’s video for Beyoncé and Jay-Z, "APESHIT" which was released in 2018. She was selected to participate in the 2019 Whitney Biennial.

Chicanafuturism

The term Chicanafuturism was originated by scholar Catherine S. Ramírez which she introduced in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies in 2004. The term is a portmanteau of 'chicana' and 'futurism', inspired by the developing movement of Afrofuturism. The word 'chicana' refers to a woman or girl of Mexican origin or descent. However, 'Chicana' itself serves as a chosen identity for many female Mexican Americans in the United States, to express self-determination and solidarity in a shared cultural, ethnic, and communal identity while openly rejecting assimilation. Ramírez created the concept of Chicanafuturism as a response to white androcentrism that she felt permeated science-fiction and American society. Chicanafuturism can be understood as part of a larger genre of Latino futurisms.

Fabiola Jean-Louis Haitian artist

Fabiola Jean-Louis is a Haitian artist working in photography, paper textile design, and sculpture. Her work examines the intersectionality of the Black experience, particularly that of women, to address the absence and imbalance of historical representation of African American and Afro-Caribbean people. Jean-Louis has earned residencies at the Museum of Art and Design (MAD), New York City, the Lux Art Institute, San Diego, and the Andrew Freedman Home in The Bronx. Fabiola lives and works in New York City.

<i>Before Yesterday We Could Fly</i> Exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room is an art exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The exhibit, which opened on November 5, 2021, uses a period room format of installation to envision the past, present, and future home of someone who lived in Seneca Village, a largely African American settlement which was destroyed to make way for the construction of Central Park in the mid-1800s.

Zizipho Poswa is an artist and ceramicist based in Cape Town, South Africa.

Period room

A period room is a display that represents the interior design and decorative art of a particular historical social setting usually in a museum. Though it may incorporate elements of an individual real room that once existed somewhere, it is usually by its nature a composite and fictional piece. Period rooms at encyclopedic museums may represent different countries and cultures, while those at historic houses may represent different eras of the same structure. As with the glamorization of luxury in costume drama, this can be considered as a conservative genre that traditionally privileges Eurocentric elite views.

References

  1. "Contact Information for Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture". The New York Public Library. Retrieved 2022-03-22.
  2. 1 2 "Michelle D. Commander, Author at Ms. Magazine". msmagazine.com. Retrieved 2022-03-22.
  3. 1 2 "ASE Graduate Student Profile > Department of American Studies and Ethnicity > USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences". dornsife.usc.edu. Retrieved 2022-03-22.
  4. 1 2 "New Associate Director and Curator of the Lapidus Center – Lapidus Center". www.lapiduscenter.org. Retrieved 2022-03-22.
  5. "Michelle Commander". Rare Book School. Retrieved 2022-03-22.
  6. Tillet, Salamishah (2021-11-17). "Afrofuturist Room at the Met Redresses a Racial Trauma". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2022-03-22.
  7. "Exhibition: Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room". Met Museum. Retrieved 2022-03-22.
  8. "5 Powerful Reasons to Visit the Met's New Afrofuturist Period Room". Architectural Digest. 2021-11-02. Retrieved 2022-03-22.
  9. "Schomburg Curator Releases Two Books in One Month". The New York Public Library. Retrieved 2022-03-22.
  10. Keller, Hadley (2021-11-03). "A New Met Museum Exhibit Reimagines the Town That Was Destroyed to Make Way for Central Park". House Beautiful. Retrieved 2022-03-22.
  11. Migan, Darla (2021-11-15). "Period Rooms Usually Glorify the Aristocracy. With Its New Afrofuturist Room, the Met's Approach Is Different". Artnet News. Retrieved 2022-03-22.
  12. "Four Professors Named Fulbright Scholars". News. 2012-10-09. Retrieved 2022-03-22.