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Theme for 23-24

Annual Theme – 2023-2024

FOREWORD

clay brick stamped with the word: foreword

'FOREWORD Brick,’ Roanoke College campus clay, 2023

For 2023-2024, the CSSR asks us to think FOREWORD. The word FOREWORD — most often used to describe literary introductions — also prompts consideration of the tension between that which precedes us and the conditions that will yet emerge and be carried forward. At a moment when truth-telling about the history and legacies of racism faces unprecedented backlash, we must hold space for candid appraisals of the past. We must read and attend to the FOREWORD.

When we think critically and carefully about race and structural racism, how we merge together consideration of the past, present, and future? What experiences, power relations, and forms of resistance have preceded us and how do these conditions carry forward amidst emergent propositions to build new futures? How do we make the FOREWORD part of the process to move forward?

During the 2023-2024 academic year, the CSSR will host conversations that contemplate the meaning of FOREWORD. As the CSSR moves forward on projects related to the history of enslavement at and around Roanoke College, we will sponsor conversations, programs, and events that produce new forms of aesthetic memory, that critique and engage patterns of knowledge production, and that expand the comparative contexts in which we examine race and racism.