Into the COLAverse – Episode 21: Mia Alafaireet

[00:00:00] Frederick: Welcome to Into the Colaverse, a podcast that takes us on the unique journeys of faculty in the College of Liberal Arts at UT Austin. Join me, your host, Frederick Luis Aldama, as we learn of the many ways that our faculty and their cutting edge work is transforming the world today. It’s my great pleasure to be here in conversation with Mia Alafaireet.

Who is joining us at UT Austin as an assistant professor in the Department of English. Welcome Mia.

[00:00:38] Mia: Thank you. It’s great to be here, Frederick.

[00:00:41] Frederick: So I’m really curious you, um, I, I think you’re from and grew up in Columbia, Missouri. If I kind of am piecing things together, but please, you know, correct me if I’m.

wrong here. Um, wondering how you, that journey to a double degree in English and French at the University of Missouri kind of happened from, I don’t know, was it, um, gosh, I have literature as a kid, French somehow there as well. Like I’m really interested in this. Absolutely.

[00:01:23] Mia: Um, and thank you for the, um, invitation to go pretty far back in time because I do think that’s where some of the roots of my interest in literature came from, right?

And doing that double major essentially into literature fields. So you mentioned that I grew up in Columbia, Missouri, and I think that that is a big part of my story as to how, you know, I ended up on this path and became interested in literature. I I grew up in a Muslim family, a multiracial Muslim family, and I came of age in the wake of 9 11.

So I think I was 11 when that happened. So right at the age where you’re already just starting to really develop your racial awareness and your understanding of racialized experience in the world. And so that was a very formative time period for me because I grew up, you know, in Columbia, which is a university town.

It’s where the flagship University of Missouri is. So in that sense, it was the kind of place where people, um, really cared about, you know, diversity and multiculturalism, uh, ostensibly, but then, you know, it was also Missouri post 9 11. And, you know, to give you sort of a snapshot of what this was like, I remember vividly, you know, going to school, public school, one day I walked into my junior high and there was this new sort of multicultural bulletin board display that one of the teachers had done as sort of a class project with one of her classes.

And it was really about representation. So there were different identities represented on the board, you know, African American, Asian American, so on and so forth. And there was, It’s sort of an example, uh, given for each one. So the representation for African Americans was Martin Luther King. So these were people that you could look up to and, you know, see yourself represented in.

And so I, you know, my 13 year old self or whatever, start looking for myself, right? And I start looking for Arab American on this wall. And when I find it, the person that the teacher had chosen to represent me. Was Osama bin Laden. And, um, I think that sort of encapsulates what my experience growing up was and what my experience in school was in that, you know, there was this effort, um, this sort of multicultural ethos around me.

But under the circus of that, that wasn’t really what I was experiencing. I was around a lot of people who didn’t understand the difference my between me and Osama bin Laden, right? And didn’t understand me as an American, which was the way that I understood myself. And so I think that’s a big part of why reading became a part of my life and such an important part of my life.

Because I found in books a kind of relationality and acceptance that maybe I wasn’t finding in the world around me. I think there was a period in my teens where I read a book a day because that’s what I did in school, right? When I had extra time at lunch or at recreational time and so on and so forth.

And I think that’s also what led me to specific interest in the Harlem Renaissance. Because Harlem Renaissance literature is, in very interesting ways, a multiracial literature, which is how I, how I identify. And I found authors like Nella Larson, who had a Danish mother and a West Indian father, right, and was navigating sort of the complexities of that identity within her own cultural moment.

And so I think that’s how I sort of, uh, fell into, uh, my studies in English. My studies in French, um, I think that was really just a function of, you know, I loved, I loved those professors and I loved the kind of community that I, I had in those smaller classes and that was meaningful to me.

[00:05:45] Frederick: Yeah, there’s so much there that, um, I kind of, you know, relate to, um, even my daughter, uh, who, um, it’s funny, like she’s just writing her college application essays and writing about how, well, Tagalog and Spanish are part of her.

You know, life and the air that she’s kind of been breathing since she was in, you know, in this world, that French actually is the language that she speaks. And I just think that’s, you know, it’s really fascinating and interesting and important for people to kind of get their heads around the complexity of, You know, and the sophistication of all of our different kinds of identities.

Oh, my God. Goodness. The Osama bin Laden. I mean, talk about putting not just putting us, you or, you know, others into a little, you know, box, but what a box, right? Oh my goodness. I’m so sorry that happened to you. Um, on the other side, I’m so glad that you were reading, gosh, a book a day. Jeez. How wonderful. Um, Mia, let me ask you then.

So, You ended up going on to the University of Wisconsin Madison for a PhD in English and a minor in health medicine. Um, so you brought in health medicine in a very proactive, intentional way into your kind of work, into your space, your learning space. First, can you tell us a little bit about what health medicine is and secondly, like how you began to weave that into your own work?

Thank you.

[00:07:35] Mia: Absolutely. So, um, I did a minor in medical history, and I think that that was, it seems more intentional on paper than it actually was. The program that I was in had an interesting structure where you were required to do a minor, but you could make up your own minor. Uh, so I knew that I was interested in the body.

So I started out with, um, this sort of made up minor on embodiment. And just as I started taking classes that I felt like would require this or would, um, be included in that minor, I ended up taking a lot of medical history classes. And I realized that I really just Liked it. Um, and so that’s how I ended up doing that.

I also think that, you know, my own experiences with health and illness sort of led me in that direction. Eventually, you know, I had a period of chronic illness in my in my twenties. Uh, especially specifically around allergic reactions, um, that were sort of just constant and I was reacting to everything and I couldn’t tell what I was reacting to.

And so I was able to take classes in that medical history program with folks like, you know, Greg Mittman, who writes specifically about allergic experience, right? And that sort of got me interested. And then I started taking courses that. Help me think more specifically about, you know, what health means in African American experience, which was very useful for my work on the Harlem Renaissance, because there actually isn’t a lot written about sort of the experience of health in this period.

But when you look close, more closely at sort of the discourse around the great migration, right, which is what sort of the came out of as a response to There’s a lot that, you know, physicians and also lay people and artists had to say about sort of the health consequences of the great migration. So it proved to be, you know, a really useful lens to me, medical history and what I would actually call, uh, that the health humanities.

So, but I, I use the term health humanities. Some people use medical humanities, uh, because it actually started as a field that was meant to sort of complement, uh, medicine, the field of medicine itself and serve to, you know, help doctors and nurses and so on and so forth do their jobs better. Right. I view what I do a little bit differently, which is why I use the term health humanities because I’m, I, of course.

It’s great to help doctors, right? It’s great to help those in the medical field. I think we can do that, but it’s not necessarily the only way of looking at it. And so instead, I think about the health humanities really just as looking at the experience of health and illness through a humanistic perspective through storytelling and visual art and so on and so forth to just help us understand those experiences better and in a fuller and richer way.

[00:10:50] Frederick: Wow. Wonderful. And the dissertation and, um, now, you know, book that I imagine you’re either finished or finishing, um, transplant, transplanting blackness, new Negro botanicals and the ecology of black health. So can you walk me, walk us, our listeners through Literature of the Harlem Renaissance, the culture, the incredible, this incredible burst of, um, well, birth of so much that was happening at the same time that you’re mindful of, you know, environmental, um, you know, health, um, That you were kind of looking at this movement of people’s focusing also on survivance, wellness, illness, um, yeah, can you tell us a little more about this?

I know that and, uh, Petrie’s The Street is a book you look at and Jean Tomer’s Cane, but yeah, I would love to hear more.

[00:11:57] Mia: Absolutely. And it’s so interesting to me that you used the word burst, right? And then you sort of walked it back. But that’s actually a really interesting word, because when people are taught about the Harlem Renaissance in the most general terms, there’s sort of two metaphors through which they’re often used, introduced to it.

One of them is the explosion Uh, so an explosion of African American literature or culture, and the other one is a flowering, a flowering of African American literature and culture. Um, and, you know, in many ways, those are, you know, useful introductions, uh, but I like to think of the Harlem Renaissance in slightly different terms, really rooted in the Great Migration, which of course is, you know, the movement of African Americans out of the rural South and into more urban areas, uh, particularly in the North, but also, you know, within the South and in the West.

And along with this movement out of the rural South came all sorts of questions about cultural redefinition and what was known in the new period or in the period as the idea of the new Negro. The moving out of the sort of Southern agrarian lifestyle into other types of places and other types of experiences really raised questions about, you know, who is the new Negro, right?

What is the race going to become? What sort of new racial future, um, can we build for ourselves? And so that was, um, sort of where the Harlem Renaissance came from, in a sense, all these questions and concerns about sort of the rebuilding of identity alongside this massive cultural and environmental shift, right, from the agrarian, agrarian South to more urban, right?

Areas. And what’s really interesting for me when I think about this environmental shift is the way that those conversations about race and environment in the period are also entangled with questions about, you know, health and illness in American medical history, health and illness have Or the language that we have used historically around health and illness, you know, these are sort of tools of social control.

So, for example, in the antebellum South, there was a physician named Samuel Cartwright who coined this. Um, diagnosis called draped mania, which essentially pathologize the act of running away, right? So a natural thing that you would do if you were enslaved would be to want to run away, right? But he cast that as an illness, right?

That needed to be treated. So that’s an example of how sort of conversations about health and medical rhetoric rhetoric were sort of used to keep people quote unquote in their place. In that case, in a very physical sense, like keep people in the South, right? Keep them from running away. And we see echoes of that in the way that physicians were writing about the Great Migration.

So there’s this, uh, book that I think is really foundational to this. This conversation that I’m glossing, uh, Vanessa Northington Gamble’s, uh, Germs Have No Color Line. And essentially what she does in the first part of this book is she collects artifacts, um, the ways that different physicians wrote about the risk of tuberculosis.

In the great migration and the metaphors that are used are fascinating. Right? These physicians compare African Americans to dinosaurs suggesting, you know, the great migration is an act of race suicide. And these people are going to die out. Like dinosaurs, because, um, they are supposedly meant to live and work in the South, right?

They’re not supposedly going to survive in these northern environments. And another, another image that comes up a lot in these racist arguments about, you know, the need to be rooted in the South, is the image of the plant, and particularly the transplant. So we have these physicians mentioning. Things like, you know, if African Americans move out of the South and into these cold northern climates, they’re going to wither away like a plant that’s been transplanted too suddenly.

And so what I’m really interested in my work, uh, is how writers of the Harlem Renaissance sort of turn that imagery on its head and think about what it means to transplant successfully. Right. And the possibility of actually imagining Black health across a range of environments, across a range of different spheres that one might transplant to in the Great Migration.

And so that’s, um, sort of the, the core image that I trace in the book is this image of Transplantation and the way that it encapsulates and a need to imagine the new Negro in the image of health rather than in the image of disease, uh, in which it was being cast in other contexts.

[00:17:30] Frederick: Wow. Amazing. Um, and I can’t wait to, to have this on the shelf here with me.

Um, Mia, I am always surprised too. Like I, you know, I teach. As you know, I do, I, I work on comics, um, comic book films, popular culture, especially Latinx. And, uh, whenever I teach Logan, my students are always, you know, pleasant. They always talk about the representation of black farmers, um, as a kind of first moment in mainstream cinema for them.

Um, just reminding them that yes, um, you know, we, we have a long history also of folks of color farming the land, not, you know, not just white farmers or, or Latinx. Um, but yeah, I wanted, I wanted to ask you and some of your work, your published work and some of your presentations, you do talk about things like black gardening.

Um, um, you also, you know, Um, in 1 presentation, I believe you that’s titled black planters, black Panthers, plants and precarity and contemporary black wellness culture. I was wondering, yeah, um, could you share some of that work? And you’re, you know, what we can learn from that.

[00:18:55] Mia: Absolutely. So the, the plants and precarity, uh, paper that you were referencing, uh, that was a presentation, uh, but I was really interested during the pandemic with some trends that I was seeing on Instagram or more specifically, black plant stagram, and essentially these, these influencers who either sort of work in their garden or, um, I Produce content related to their house plants, uh, were also sort of emulating, uh, panther imagery, right?

So suddenly during the pandemic, uh, these influencers were posing with their house plants, uh, in panther gear, right? So black berets and leather jackets. And there was this interesting play on black planter And Black Panther, and it proved to be sort of a fleeting moment. I feel like it was a period of a few months when I was really seeing this circulate.

But what I was seeing was ways in which, you know, plants are connected to wellness culture in the contemporary moment and how that connects to. Sure, formulations of health that were circulating in the 20th century, both in the Harlem Renaissance and also the black pan within the Black Panther movement, sort of recasting the way that we think about health.

Toward the social framework, right? So, um, any work that is done to improve sort of social conditions of the race is also work that’s done to preserve sort of the health of the race, which ties to also the medical civil rights movement more broadly. And so I was interested in those echoes and the ways that plants in um, The context of the pandemic were being used to promote wellness, uh, culture specifically within sort of Black planter communities.

The garden, as you mentioned, is also very important to my work. One of the chapters in the book that, uh, I really enjoyed writing the most was my chapter on Anne Spencer’s garden. And Anne Spencer is a very interesting figure of the Harlem Renaissance because she was an artist who worked in multiple mediums.

She was a poet and she was also a gardener. And those arts influenced each other. So she spent the majority of her waking hours, um, when she was able to actually out in her garden planting and replanting it and constantly sort of revising her schemes. And that’s also where she wrote her poetry. She wrote her poetry in her garden, often about her garden and had sort of a very similar Aesthetic of constant revision, right?

She wrote her poem, she published them, and then she often changed them again. And I think what is so powerful to me about Anne Spencer and her garden is. The way that she helps us think about sort of the fullness of the gardens potential when we think about gardens in relationship to social justice, especially at our current moment, it’s often linked specifically to food justice.

Um, you know, growing, sharing produce, um, countering food deserts and so on and so forth. But Anne Spencer was really about sort of the beauty of her garden. She actually didn’t grow vegetables, right? She grew for the delight that she got, like the beauty that she got from these plants. And I’m interested in how her model of gardening is something that, you know, can still produce health and wellness in the current moment, thinking about, you know, beauty as a public right, beauty as something that supports Black health, which also has roots.

In the Harlem Renaissance. So when I write about Anne Spencer and her garden, I connect it to a movement in the period called National Negro Health Week, which was started by Booker T. Washington in 1915 and ran up through 1950. And it was sort of a week long, um, health improvement campaign every year in April.

And when you look at what was actually done as part of this week long health campaign, so much of it has to do with beauty. There were things like, you know, um, organizing communities, uh, for doctor’s visits and dental visits and things like that, but there were also all sorts of beauty oriented contests.

Where there was a cleanup day, for example, where that day of health week was devoted just to beautifying houses or community spaces and different communities were judged in these competitions by, you know, before and after photos, right? Or, um, reports where they would report things like how many flower boxes there were.

They planted. So these are all things about beautification. There were also a beauty contest, you know, Mr and Mrs Health as part of National Negro Health Week. And so there are ways in which, you know, and Spencer sort of translated that to her garden. What does it mean to build a beautiful space? And what sort of impacts does this have on our health?

And I’m interested to see, I feel like in the current moment as I’m following, you know, different conversations community gardens, there is, uh, sort of this expansion, uh, in what the community garden does that reminds me of Ann Spencer in that it’s sort of expanding outside this, um, realm of food justice, which it seemed to, where it seemed to have gotten its start.

[00:25:06] Frederick: Wow. Yeah. Amazing. And I know that you are very proactive within the space of writing and writing for social justice. Um, assistant director to the writing center, university of Wisconsin at one point also running workshops on dissertation, writing, designing inclusive writing assignments. Um, the writing for social justice writer activists share their work, um, working with students and the multicultural center.

Um, Yeah. Gosh, you even, I read this beautiful piece of yours where you talk about as an undergraduate kind of finding your way to this orchard of pear trees and this edge of a flower bed, uh, for your own writing. Um, so yeah, the connection between not just kind of looking at others and their writing, but the actual practice of writing.

[00:26:05] Mia: Right. I think that the piece that you’re referring to is. Uh, a piece where I’m sort of reflecting on, you know, what it took for me to write my, my senior thesis, which was not very well thought out, um, but through that process, really sort of developing kind of an identity as a a writer, which I think is the case for many of us.

The first time that you really get that long writing project, you, you learn a lot about yourself. And I haven’t really thought about the significance of those details that I shared about, you know, perching on the edge of a flower bed or under a pear tree to write. But I do think that You know, the natural world is kind of an integral part of how I think about, you know, not just the process of writing, but also the process of reading.

Uh, I was lucky to, I think as a child, I had family members who would take me out in nature and really just taught me to be a noticer. right, to train my eye toward the small. And I notice this about myself still to this day. I’ll go out on a hike in the mountains and not even really notice the mountains, right?

I’m looking at the tiny alpine flower or I go by the river and I’m noticing, you know, the frog in the puddle by the side. And so I think that, you know, in some ways, I feel like my reading practice and my experience of being in my environment are linked to one another. And probably my, my process of writing as well, in the sense that I’m sort of always close reading what’s around me, either, you know, on the page that someone else has written or I have written, or I’m close reading the, the natural environment around me as well.

[00:27:57] Frederick: You’ve taught or you teach courses on nature writing, blank, black planters, history of medicine, science fiction, um, um, nature writing is that, um, tell me a little bit about a course like that with you.

[00:28:13] Mia: Right. So I’ve taught one course related to sort of this theme of nature writing and it was called the trouble with nature writing.

So it was actually a composition course and. It’s sort of a play on, uh, the piece, The Trouble with Wilderness, Bill Cronin’s The Trouble with Wilderness, where he sort of talks about, sort of, the ethical implications of This idea of an untouched wilderness, right? And how this concept of an untouched wilderness causes us to neglect or not recognize the nature in our day to day lives, right?

The plant growing up from the sidewalk, as an example. And so that class really took Bill Cronin’s The Trouble with Wilderness as its starting point for examining for the ethical implications of, you know, the way that we write about nature and ethical quandaries that are bound up with it. So, for example, one of the things that we read in that class aside from Bill Cronin was a piece by Camille Dungy, who’s also a poet and a gardener, and she wrote this piece for terrain on terrain.

org about her garden as an allegory for diversity. And I had students actually write their own piece in a similar style where they had to use A nature metaphor to talk about, you know, an issue, a contemporary issue that matters to them. Right. And then they had to go through this process of examining, you know, their own nature metaphor and thinking about what’s at stake in using this.

as a metaphor, right? What comes out of it that is potentially useful, what comes out of it that’s potentially problematic. And overall, I think that, um, students really enjoyed the way that that course helped them to break out of a framework in which nature writing is understood as totally affirming.

Because often when we hear that idea of nature writing, we just think of someone’s sort of rhapsodic experiences in nature. And we don’t think about the ways that, you know, experiences in nature are also bound up with, you know, our political climate and racialized experience and so on.

[00:30:47] Frederick: Wow. Amazing.

Beautiful. Um, yeah, really, really great. Yeah. I’ll very often, you know, that’s another area that, um, students are surprised to learn that, you know. Writers of color are engaging in that space, but in in in very different ways, you know, and sort of stretching their understanding of what nature writing is is so important.

You mentioned that you were reading germs have no color lines. I’m wondering if there’s anything right now. That’s, you know, besides that, or maybe that book in particular, that’s that you’re reading that you’re watching. Um, That’s really kind of grabbing your attention. This is the what’s at your bookstand kind of question.

Absolutely.

[00:31:36] Mia: What I’m reading right now is actually a lot of George Washington Carver. So specifically his experiment station bulletins. Um, so we, we think of George Washington Carver as a scientist, which of course he was, but he did a lot of writing and one of the things that he did as part of his career was traveling around in a movable wagon, sort of teaching rural black farmers about, you know, different farming techniques, but he would also write A regular newsletter that was distributed thinking about, you know, ways to increase your yields, the best plants to plant, and what I’m finding very interesting as I’m reading his experimentation bulletins is the way that it becomes difficult to tell sometimes when George Washington Carver is writing about plants and when he’s actually writing about plants.

University’s community. So for example, one of my favorite bulletins that I’m reading right now is one called Possibilities of the Sweet Potato in Macon County. And where George Washington Carver is basically, you know, arguing that everyone should be planting sweet potatoes and this place right here in Macon County, Alabama is the very best place to grow sweet potatoes.

And you can’t help but hear the echo, um, since George Washington Carver was at Tuskegee, of Booker T. Washington’s argument. Uh, for staying in the South, right? And the idea of growing a Black future on Southern soil. So there’s this very interesting interplay between, you know, Black life and plant life in George Washington Carver that I’m working on tracing right now.

[00:33:29] Frederick: Wow. Beautiful. Yeah. I love that. And I also love sweet potatoes, by the way. Um, And, uh, well, gosh, Mia, Allah, very, thank you so much. This has been. Like such a honor and pleasure listening and learning from you today. Thank you.

[00:33:49] Mia: Yes. It’s been a pleasure talking with you too, Frederick. Thank you.

Into the Colaverse is produced by the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Liberal Arts. Sound engineering by the Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services. You can find Into the Coliverse podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. Thanks for listening and see you next time.