Writing Fellows 2023

Historian and associate professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at Santa Clara University.

Sakina Hughes is an historian and associate professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at Santa Clara University, a Jesuit school in the San Francisco Bay.  She specializes in nineteenth and twentieth century U.S. history with a focus on African American and Indigenous histories, Race and Ethnicity and Gender.   She completed her doctoral degree at Michigan State University in 2012 and was the 2012-2013 Du Bois-Mandela-Rodney fellow at the University of Michigan in the Department of African American and African Studies.  Hughes’ research considers mobility, performance, racial uplift, respectability politics and conceptions of freedom and democracy.  Her book, Under Other Tents:  African Americans and Native Americans in the Golden Age of the Circus, under contract at the University of North Carolina Press, will excavate for the first time the experiences that African Americans and Native Americans shared during the rise of American popular entertainment in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  She argues that circuses, minstrel shows, Wild West Shows and other traveling shows in the post-bellum, pre-Harlem era presented incredible challenges due to racial bigotry, but also enabled some Black and Indigenous Americans to sustain robust communities and build national and international careers.  These artists spread their cultures such as ragtime, blues, dance, art, and foodways.  Hughes’ research has been supported by Newberry Library D’Arcy McNickle Center Fellowships, the CIC-AISC, and various other organizations.  She is featured in the PBS American Experience documentary, The Circus.

Hughes’ new book project, supported by a Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study Writing Fellowship,  is “Dream with Your Eyes Wide Open”:  Uplift Narratives, Black Excellence and the Cost of Being “Born Free.”  It is a comparative, interdisciplinary study of how Black girls and women in post-arpartheid South Africa and post-civil rights era America navigate and adjust to  life in predominantly white schools, neighborhoods and organizations.  Discussions of Black success and Black excellence often look at what is gained–such as “better” education, neighborhoods, and jobs–by moving to predominantly white spaces.  In reality, many of the born free generation feel their new mobility is an “unfortunate privilege,” an existence created by white supremacist values, defined by white people and punctuated by white elitist culture that often shuns Black voices, cultures and lives. She argues against the white supremacy inherent in discussions that value white educational and social spaces, which are often toxic and mediocre, over Black spaces and ways of knowing.  Furthermore, this study will use a Pan-African feminist lens to interrogate uplift narratives and mechanisms of Black excellence by centering Black women in predominantly white spaces. Topics include:  education, culture and language, neighborhoods, policing, leisure, hygiene and hair, and sexuality and loving relationships.  This enables us to critique assimilationist and meritocracy narratives which claim one-dimensional answers–such as education or economics–to persistent social ills and injustice.  Many successful middle-class Black South Africans and African Americans lament the loss of language, culture and fellowship.  These losses lead to further loss of joy, feelings of safety, feeling comfortable in one’s own body, and the ability to find love and meaningful relationships.  Other questions important to this study are:  What is the sustainability of the rising Black middle class if, once out of poverty, they face so much racism and discrimination that their physical and mental health suffers?  What does it mean for a Black woman to be “free” in a South African or American multiracial democracy?  Answering these questions is crucial for both the United States and South Africa if either nation is going to be able to truly move into true multicultural democracies.  In that regard, this study aims to propose a new vision for freedom in multiracial democracies, a vision long overdue in both the United States and South Africa.

Watch the interview with Professor Sakina Hughes below: