Our conversation this week is with the illustrious storyteller, award-winning writer, and Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, B. Brian Foster.
"How can you love something and not like it at the same time?" This question was the center of Brian's monumental book, "I Don't Like the Blues". The better part of five years he spent living in Clarksdale, Mississippi listening to black people talk about their experiences and persective on the Blues - as music, an economic reviatilization effort, and a way of knowing. In that book and everything else he does, Brian exumes and gives life to the stories of black folks in the rural South that don't get their just due.
Like any good ethnographer, Brian goes to the places that are talking so he can listen. In his words: "The dirt remembers. The spirit hollers." To catch the spirits you need a vessel and time. Brian is a vessel, and if you give him time to listen he'll continue to holler so we can hear and know more stories that have long been buried underground.
In this episode you'll hear Brian talk about his own story, his seminal book, defiant challenges to the academe and the "blue-chip" scholar ideal, and how he uses storytelling as a powerful teaching tool. I hope you enjoy listening to him as much as I did.
Mentioned in this episode:
The Sovereignty of Quiet by Kevin Quashie
The House that Black Built: Black Women, Materiality, and Makeshifting in the Jim Crow South, 1927-1947 by Kimber Thomas
