PR: At Whittier College, “Narrative, Community, and the Transformative Possibilities of Brown Storytelling” is a three-year campus initiative dedicated to amplifying stories that celebrate the complexity, friction, and expansiveness of a “brown” identity.  We seek to investigate the historical roots, evolution, and utility of the term in relationship to artistic practices across diasporas and in the United States.  We were thrilled to have you as our inaugural writer-in-residence during the spring 2024 semester!   

 

How was your time at Whittier College?  

​​​

RG: My time at Whittier College was generative and amazing. I was able to really hear myself think and reflect on various intersections of politics and aesthetics.  I felt fortunate to work with students who were so smart and interesting and dedicated to their own artistic pursuits.  

 

PR: Your students read Nikki Darling’s novel 'Fade Into You'. Why did you decide to include Fade Into You in your course syllabus?  You invited Nikki Darling to your class for a book reading. How did your students respond to the learning experience? 

​​

RG: I was focused on engaging the immediate environment of Whittier College and that included texts that could offer a portrait of place. Fade Into You is a genre-jumping text that reads like a young adult novel but is an autofiction work that takes place in the San Gabriel Valley in the mid-1990s. The book was full of dialogue that told the story of Southern California teens interested in art and hanging out at the Laserium at the Griffith Park Observatory, and concerned about the pressures of adulthood. I invited Nikki Darling to narrate her experiences at the Los Angeles County High School of the Arts and to share insights of being a young person working towards a professional career in the arts. My students shared insights about relating to the material and finding some reflection in the way Darling’s characters related to each other on the page. 

 

PR: You mentioned that your students journaled over the semester. Can you share more about this learning activity and what you discovered about your students?  

​​​

RG: The journals felt like a low-pressure mode of weekly reflection. It was a place students can chronicle their initial impressions of the readings and visual cultural texts we engaged weekly. From those initial impressions students could have conversations and refine their impressions, grow their impressions, and revisit any biases they might have had in their initial encounter with the reading or the work in question.  

 

During our walks to Uptown Whittier it was amazing learning about the cultural history of the area through your memories and experiences, including where you purchased vinyl records and the cafes that were meaningful to you. It was also interesting to gain an understanding of how much the area has changed and at the same time has not changed much. At the end of the year Storylab gathering you read a fascinating short work in progress. After your reading you mentioned the concept of nostalgia or remembrance, but also moving past these notions. If you are able to, can you please share more details about the significance of place in your upcoming book?  

​

There is something powerful about the way a neighborhood, a suburb, an institution, a gathering place, the third place can have on an artist. These are places that serve as the setting for formative experiences. I have a tendency to connect important milestones to the places in which they took place. The first time I met someone or connected with a group of young people over music felt big because it was a way in which we could serve as witnesses to each other’s cultivation. I met people who maybe had passions about music and art but their ambitions were railroaded into industries that promised better salaries. A place is often a location that marks entries and departures and a way to build characters by the details they adopt thanks to the places (and the people in those places) that raised and influenced them.  

 

PR: What utility does the term “brown” offer artists, storytellers, and cultural producers in the United States?  

​

RG: It offers cultural producers a chance to resist certain conventions of storytelling–like a backstory instead of characteristics built on details; or that a person is who they are based on the political borders their families are somehow tied to or beholden to and so somehow that must factor into the tale that is being told.  

 

PR: How can “brownness” help transgress categorizations of identity? 

​

“Brown” is a term that ultimately complicates the idea of identity as a monolithic category. It finds a way to show the messiness, the chaos or the absurdity of trying to neatly package an idea of a person, a people to a nation-state. Brown is a means towards solidarity by way of reflecting back the idea that we are all surviving our respective histories dispossession.