Interview of Dr. Michele Berger, Associate Professor in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill Tiffany Pennamon: Hello, my name is Tiffany Pennamon. It is January 31, and we're here at the Zora Festival in Eatonville, Florida, and I'm with Dr. Michele Berg... Michele Berger: Berger. Tiffany Pennamon: [0:11] Berger. And, uh, I would like to get started, so just tell me a little bit about yourself and what got you interested in Afrofuturism? Michele Berger: So I am a scholar of Women's and Gender Studies and have been writing creative work for a long time, um, probably 25 years, more than that, but really, in terms of getting sort of published and being better known for my creative work has come in the last 10 years. And I have a funny relationship to Afrofuturism, um, because when I was writing or starting to write in the 90s, there was – I knew Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany, but I really thought – and, and I'm 51, so I really thought that, at that time, I was one of the only black people who wrote science fiction or was interested in it. And when I would go to science fiction conventions, there really weren't a lot of people who looked like me. And it was Nisi Shawl, who's a really wonderful writer, well-known writer, she happened to be, um, uh, working at this used book store. I was a graduate student at University of Michigan, this is in Ann Arbor, and she was like the other person of color I met, and we would talk about things that later got defined as Afrofuturist. I tend to describe my work as, um, extraordinary things that happen to ordinary people. Tiffany Pennamon: [1:37] Nice. And so, in your own terms, um, how would you define Afrofuturism itself, um, and then how can we apply it to the [whiter 1:45] world? Michele Berger: So, to me, Afrofuturism is a type of aesthetic, and it questions the way in which canons have been created that depict African-descended people. So that – so mine, mine is really broad, um, and I think people focus a lot on the futuristic part as in projecting, um, what are the narratives that are gonna sustain black people and people of color in the future, but I think it's also important to recognize that Afrofuturism is also about rethinking the past, right, and providing different kinds of narratives, um, questioning the tropes that we have used. And, and I – you know, that's in, um, arts, politics, literature, visual design, fashion design. I primarily know more about, you know, speculative fiction, um, so that's kind of where my interest has been, but I feel like people are using it – to answer the second part of your question, people are using it to really think about what are the structures that we have that take away life, right, and that really harm particularly people of color and particularly people of African descent and what are new ways looking at both creating new forms but also looking at what, um, certain authors have written to help us think more imaginatively. And so that... Tiffany Pennamon: And so they're – yeah. Michele Berger: And also, I mean, some of that now is also being reflected in, in our movies, of course, and to some degree TV but really, in many ways, it started with music and literature and even politics. And now it is, in some ways, much more mainstream. Tiffany Pennamon: And so going back to what you said about, um, sometimes people think of it mostly as that future side, but rethinking the past it reminds me of Kindred with Octavia Butler. Michele Berger: Absolutely. Tiffany Pennamon: [3:43] And so how would you say that, um, just black woman writers have really informed your own writing in terms of this genre and Afrofuturism? Michele Berger: Yeah, I mean, it – I – so personally, I feel like I'm very much indebted to, um, the work of black women writers, 20th-century black women writers generally, so people like Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, Pearl Cleage, um, a number of people in the, who were writing, 80s and 90s. Now, in a more contemporary moment, I do a lot of work in – I'm sort of – I've come out recently as a horror writer and writer of sort of "dark fiction" and so, um, I love the work that's being done by people like Eden Royce, um, Nicole Kurtz, um, formerly Nicole Kurtz, she's now Nicole Smith, Linda Addison. I think that, um, really thinking about how women of color are reshaping what is horrific and moving away from this idea of, um, you know, creepy bad things, let's just say, like what, you know, what many of us grew up with in the 80s and 90s of Stephen King, who's a wonderful writer, but looking at the ways in which, um, harassment, uh, sexuality, you know, legacies of slavery, the politics of beauty are, um, have impacted our lives and are horrific and grotesque and, and worth reconsidering and thinking about. So the collection that came out a couple years ago, Sycorax's Daughters, um, which is a collection of prose and poetry prim-, primarily by, um, black women and they basically take on the horror field and, um, the work in there is really thinking about also how black female bodies have been depicted and labeled in certain kinds of ways and, and taking that on, so I find that, you know, really interesting as well as, you know, more on the, on the sort of science fiction end but just in terms of, of horror has been really powerful. And I'll, I'll just say one more thing as someone who – so I was kinda raised, um, in 70s and 80s and watch a lot of horror media, um, but then more recently went back and kind of reread the classics and reading other new work and, you know, when I read a lot of majority writers, there's no space for us. It – we're not, I should say, we're often not – I won't say exclusive but we're not often fleshed out as characters in horror. Tiffany Pennamon: Mm-hm. Michele Berger: Um, as women of color characters and we're just, we're just not there. Um, or if we're there, we're either the, you know, the magical negro, the, the conjure woman, you know, those kinds of things, right? And so just understanding that, particularly in this space around, um, horror and dark fiction, there's some new, exciting work out there by women of color that you're just not, you're not gonna find in other places. Tiffany Pennamon: Mm-hm. And me and Kim were having that conversation recently, um, just about the lack of institutional space for black women in horror, [7:02] and so how do you engage in these conversations with your own students, um like are they doing any interesting work that you're helping them with as well? Michele Berger: So it's, it's so funny because my PhD's in Political Science and, and I do interdisciplinary work and I'm, I'm in a Women's and Gender Studies department, and it's taken me a long while to figure out, um, how to, uh, have a more integrated approach. So my work is on racial and gender health disparities, which are – can be horrific when we think about systematic inequalities of women of color, um, but until recently, I haven't really found ways to, um, bring some of that other work as a creative writer, as a creative person. One of the ways it's happened is I teach a Women and Creativity course, upper division course, and in that, we look at the ways in which, um, women as a sort of in the, in the past two centuries have been excluded, have pushed against ideas of what is, you know, creative and artistic, but I, um, often teach, um, uh, Mind of My Mind by Octavia Butler, and that's, that's actually one that – I mean, now it's kind of back in popularity but it's in – if people have read Octavia Butler, and some of my students have, they are not as familiar with that. And it's just such a interesting novel in so many ways and so they really love it. So that's one of their entryways. And I also teach, um, so if I have an opportunity also teach some short fiction by, um, uh, it's kinda feminist back to the fiction writer. So that's one way but then the other way is not so much in the horror end but, um, I just threw a big campus-wide initiative – I cotaught a class about the environment and intersectionality but we use it through a sci-fi lens. And I happened to teach with a African-American female professor in German Studies, German and Slavic Studies and an African-American woman, professor, who was in, um, public health. And we, the three of us cotaught this class, which was – and I think about it, for first-year students coming in, all three professors are black women and we're all talking about – and we each had sort of our specialties but we, we tried to use how has science fiction represented the environment and what does it tell us about vulnerability, so we looked at like Beast of the Southern Wild and a range of texts. And, uh, we got into an Afrofuturist perspective even though we weren't specifically talking as much about horror, so I feel like the future is kind of bright for trying to, you know, find ways to, um, use the lens of Afrofuturism to talk about disparities or to introduce kind of, um, important concepts to students. And, and also, students are coming with a much wider, you know, visual and reading landscape than they did even five, ten years ago. Tiffany Pennamon: [9:59] Mm-hm. And so – and then when you're thinking about people and writers like Zora Neale Hurston... Michele Berger: Oh, my goodness. Tiffany Pennamon: ...how do you make those connections between her legacy... Michele Berger: Oh, my goodness. Tiffany Pennamon: ...and the work that you're doing? Michele Berger: Oh, my goodness. Tiffany Pennamon: [laughter] Michele Berger: Um, yeah. It's such an honor to, to be here at this festival. I, um, there's, there's so many things going through my mind. Um, to, to some degree, I think it is the next reclaiming of her work, right, because Alice Walker, um, wrote in the – her volume, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens really reintroduced Zora Neale Hurston to, um, both the emerging kind of feminist literary studies as well as to a larger public. But I think now, people are recognizing Zora Neale's, um, genius, right, and envisioning – to one, to not be afraid of the past and to kinda probe deeply into some, um, tropes and ideas about wider African-American culture. And I think we're now ready – 'cause people have, you know, when, when Zora was writing, people were very, um, othering of her work and ashamed of her work and, um, and I think, you know, now, so many writers see her, her creativity and her genius as part of what this kind of next wave of thinking about both our survival but also kind of, of our roots. Tiffany Pennamon: Mm-hm. Michele Berger: And so it's, um, to me, it's, it's, like I said, it's sort of the second imagining, reimagining of her work. Tiffany Pennamon: And then earlier today, you mentioned that your [novella 11:36], Reenu-You... Michele Berger: Mm-hm. Tiffany Pennamon: ...is about black women saving the world. Michele Berger: [laughter] Tiffany Pennamon: [11:42] Could you speak a little bit about that? Michele Berger: [laughter] Well, so yeah. Um, it's set in the 1990s and basically, it is – the tagline is what if a trip to the salon could kill you? And it imagines, um, a natural hair care product called Reenu-You, um, that potentially has a virus. And so initially, black women, Latino women, who are using it, um, get sick. And doctors sort of dismiss it as a skin rash. And so you follow two, um, protagonists who try to find out what's happening, and, and so it's got a little bit of the conspiracy theory, it's got a little bit of, you know, this is obviously written before the widespread use of cell phones, so that idea of rumors that circulate. And – but I wanted to get at the politics of beauty. Not, not so much in saying any one hairstyle or one way of being is wrong, but to make us think about what are the push-pull factors that, um, you know, create the context for certain kinds of, um, arranging our hair. And – but it is, is actually based on a, a true incident in that in the 90s, there was a product called Rio, and it was billed as a natural hair care tonic or something, um, out of Brazil. And I played with that idea and in real life, within two or three years on the market, it – there was a class-action lawsuit bought – brought by women of color because their scalps were burning. There was actually almo-, no natural products in it. It had higher, um, percentages of lye and other products, but it was billed under this kind of natural health. And so I sort of took that idea and wanted to play with all of those pieces and, um, also set the, the tone of the, the novella as that it's, it's really about collective female friendship that's going to help the women figure out what's going on. And so often in, um, so often in a lot of, I think, mainstream sci-fi speculative fiction, particularly film and TV, if you have a woman – it's like, it's basically a cast of guys and then there's one woman. And that – and I l-, for example, I love Wonder Woman, right? And Wonder Woman was a fantastic [film on so many levels 14:04] but I'm like it's basically, you know, we kinda, she gets excised from her community and then, you know, she's with these guys. And then it also happens around sort of race and ethnicity, right? So there would be like one person of color in this other ensemble, and I just wanted to kinda play with that ensemble idea and, so – for so many black women and women of color, we have been each other's peer networks and we've been the witnesses and the guides and the support. And so I wanted to explore that through female friendship and also, you know, to some degree, counter the narrative that black women are competitive and jeal-, I mean, if you look at the reality TV show landscape, right? Tiffany Pennamon: Mm-hm. Michele Berger: You just see, um, so many, so many ways in which black women seem to be antagonistic and opposed to each other, so I wanted to play with, with those – some of those things. Tiffany Pennamon: Mm-kay. And that really speaks to you, just like the – that element of black women writers, um, in terms of how they brought each other's work to prominence in terms of that public discourse, um, like Toni Morrison as editor, bringing all of her friends like revolutionize, um, like really memorializing their work too. Michele Berger: Absolutely. I mean, absolutely. And I, you know, as you're, as you're, um, talking through these questions, I mean, I really have to sort of locate myself in that I was, I was that person in, in undergrad in the late 80s, and it was, it was, it felt revolutionary to read Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. I mean, they were just starting to come into the, the canon in terms of what was acceptable, and, and also it was often, you know, 'cause I had primarily white, female professors who were teaching that work, and I was so grateful even though I see different things than they might see in the work, it was so grateful to have that, that context. And then, you know, of course, you go back and you read Gwendolyn Brooks and you read so many people before them, but to have that kind of [inaudible 16:01] like Toni Cade Bambara and, you know, many, many people who are not as – I think there's been a resurgence, but they're not as well read as they once were. Tiffany Pennamon: Right. Michele Berger: And I think we, we also have to kind of give our due to the people who have come before us, which is kinda like Zora Neale Hurston, right? Tiffany Pennamon: [16:20] Yes. And so, just in your own community in North Carolina, you're at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, what work are you doing in the community as well in terms of connecting people with Afrofuturism and speculative fiction...or black speculative fiction? Michele Berger: Yeah, that's a great question. Uh, so...we're, um, very privileged to have Toshi Reagon who is an artist-in-residence and she, a couple of years ago, adapted Parable of the Sower as an opera, um, or as a, as a opera and kind of a musical production, and one of the things that – so I, I wasn't – I mean, I, I wasn't directly involved in the production, but in supporting the effort – so Toshi was very, um, strategic in that she wanted the, the, um, performance was happening on campus but prior to that, she wanted to do a series of talks and, and events in the community, around the community. And she also wanted to upend this idea of, you know, who the Parable of the Sower was for. And that took – she really pushed back on, um, some ideas that the university had of like a kind of formal event. So, so as part of that effort, um, I organized just a conversation about Parable of the Sower with my colleague at the time, Lilly Nguyen, who is Vietnamese American and we, we did, um, we held a space at a local, um, books-, bookstore and kinda did a community read and, and I – we talked a lot about some of the mother-daughter themes in Parable of the Sower and some other, other ways that we wanted people to read the book, ideally, before they saw the performance but also other ways we wanted to kinda highlight Butler's work, and so that was really, um, it was really a gift to be with my colleague, um, and see the work through her eyes and also – so this is like, I think, what, 2017? So we're all still – we're still trying to process what the Trump legacy, presidency was going to mean, the kind of turmoil that was happening in our community, so it was a powerful time to talk about Parable of the Sower. Tiffany Pennamon: Mm-hm. And that – it reminds me of, um, just like the element of when you said rethinking the past with Afrofuturism, [18:40] also like what does our past now look like in the future, so like at our current moment, and so how do you see Afrofuturistic writers right now really shaping our future? Michele Berger: Mm. I, I think one of the...and I, you know, I, I could be wrong about this but one of the things that, um, I, I think [buoys 19:02] people when they come to cotemporary Afrofuturist work is that there's a thread of resilience and optimism. And, um, and I think we need that, you know, I think it's very, you know, making critiques is, is a very direct thing right there, especially because there are so many things that seem to be, um, in crisis or being challenged but, um, what will sustain people really is doing the work of thinking about how do we make strong connections and build community and even if that community, um, looks slightly different than it does now, and I – so I think that's, that's where, to me, where the readers are, um, really resonating with our work, right? Um, and particularly I would say on the – 'cause horror, by its nature, tends to have a, a, a much more, um, I don't wanna say just sort of darker but the sense of it's cathartic in a different way than I think what, what kinda traditional science fiction does, which is to kinda move us way, way ahead into the future. Um, so I, I think some of the writers that are, that are doing that work are – leave those kernels of kind of optimism, right? And so – but we also – we don't know. I mean, it's not, it's not clear...for the, for our human community where we will be in 20 years, right? Um, we are at such a – I've been trying to read a little bit more what people are calling cli-sci-fi, climate science fiction, um, even though people have been writing that for a long time and, you know, we have to ask ourselves pretty deep questions about ourselves as, as a species, right? And so I think, um, for Afrofuturist folks to try to do that but also, you know, lay some optimistic seeds in there is really important. Tiffany Pennamon: Mm-hm. And especially, um, around the climate change topic. I know, just for Zora Neale, her science fiction, just like her capturing of like the environmental symbolism, um... Michele Berger: Mm. Tiffany Pennamon: ...her local Everglades and Eatonville... Michele Berger: Yes. Tiffany Pennamon: ...community, um, as we see at the festival now, just like that preservation. Michele Berger: Yes. Tiffany Pennamon: Um, I made a comment that in Their Eyes are Watching God how she documented the actual 1928, Lake Okeechobee, Category 5 hurricane. Michele Berger: Oh, right. Tiffany Pennamon: And so it's like even that was like prophetic of our current times where like hurricanes are growing in frequency and strength, um, like they're devastating Caribbean communities, [21:45] and so like what does that mean in terms of preserving culture and language and the peoples' traditions? Michele Berger: Yeah, and it's s-, so, so powerful because I had forgotten that there was that piece in her work for sure. Um, well, and, and also what, what does it mean – I think – so what does it mean to be in an environment? What does that look like? Um, in the class that I talked about earlier, trying to get – some students got it that because of historic inequalities, some of the people most affected by climate change are going to be women, globally, people of color, um, you know, um, poorer communities, all of that. But then trying – for the students who didn't get that, trying to get them to understand that, um, community may have to be refigured in some new ways, right, institutions may need to be configured in new ways was, was also a, a challenge. Politics need to maybe be reconfigured in some new ways. Um, yeah, and I don't know as much, uh, about the group in Durham that has been doing, uh, emergent strategies. I think they're based in Durham and I should know more about them, but that's another community that has sort of taken up Octavia Butler's work and, and also, Toshi Reagon's lo-, so she did the Parable of the Sower but she's an artist-in-residence for several more years and wants to really say, um, have conversations and practices that say, okay – I think the way she frames it is, "Okay, if things broke down right now, what resources do you have inside of yourself..." just like, um, Lauren from Parable of the Sower, "...and what resource do you have in your community that you would draw on?" So trying to really get people to think about that, I think, is her next project. Tiffany Pennamon: Okay. Michele Berger: Which is pretty exciting. Tiffany Pennamon: And then I saw that one of your books is Transforming Scholarship: Why Women's and Gender Studies Students Are Changing Themselves and the World, [23:49] and so how do you see you and your students and your colleagues really playing their role in helping society figure out like what's gonna happen when climate change like affects how we survive and coexist together, um, how gender constructs are refigured and oppressive things, hopefully, eliminated? Michele Berger: Mm-hm. Oh, my goodness, that's a great question. So, so that book was trying to push back on that liberal arts, that skepticism about the liberal arts, like what can you do with this degree? Tiffany Pennamon: Mm-hm. Michele Berger: So our – through empirical work, so we did a big, global survey and then we did some interviews and we saw these patterns that most Women's and Gender Studies students begin, um, broadly define kind of, different levels of activism as students and sort of civic engagement. And then, you know, 'cause we, we talk to people five and ten years out, we see how those legacies continue, right? And so some of it is using their critical skills to, um, rethink the workplace, let's just say, or to advocate for gender equality, racial equality in the work place but, but it's also like building better community, so we are actually able to document that. Um, and I think what's been interesting – so now, we're in the process – my collaborator and I, are in the process of writing a third edition and in this one, we're trying to front-load, um, so many students who, um, have gone on or are interested in the environment and cl-, and climate change, so we're documenting the rise of – for example, um, female, uh, small, local farmers, organic farmers, um, we're trying to document, um, women, in particular but not exclusively, going into the – challenging the ag industry but also going into biofuels. So, um, we were trying to document all the ways in which people are using their degrees in unexpected way and, and often finding – like for example, um, the biofuels industry and it might reflect a kind of we might say progressive idea about resources but the actual day-to-day experiences are highly gendered, and so we have a student, a former graduate, writing about, about that. Like what does it mean to use – when people assume, you know, you can't use heavy machinery or you can't do this or, or just assume certain ideas about particularly what bodies can do certain things. So, um, so I think in that regard, that's what we, we get feedback all the time that, um, that sometimes liberal arts students get sort of pushed into certain kinds of jobs or in the nonprofit area, which there's nothing wrong with that but to see any job as a job, one, that you can bring a gendered, um, analysis to and a, and a, and a, you know, I always no job is a feminist job but you can make, you know, um, feminist thinking a part of any job, um, but also, the, the sense of how students are – graduates are really pushing down boundaries of like nonprofit versus corporate versus business versus other kinds of – versus entrepreneurship that the landscape is much wider – much more widely open. Tiffany Pennamon: [27:11] Mm-kay. And then are you interviewing these students and that's how you're collecting your data, so the qualitative aspect? Michele Berger: So yeah, so we did, so we – the survey has about, um, about 900 students... Tiffany Pennamon: Okay. Michele Berger: ...graduates in the survey from, um, over 10 years out and then we did some, um, interviewing from that. And then we have these kind of, um, highlights of career trajectories throughout the book. Tiffany Pennamon: Okay. Michele Berger: So yeah. So that's a – we're not doing another reboot. If after the third edition, then we might do a complete reboot, we would do the survey differently and... Tiffany Pennamon: Okay. Michele Berger: Yeah. Tiffany Pennamon: So that reminds me of Zora Neale Hurton's, um, like the qualitative aspect of her anthropological work and so, um, I've also been having some conversations just on the value of different methods so... Michele Berger: Absolutely. Tiffany Pennamon: ...like how qualitative sometimes is kind of dismissed as not valid because it's not like data like statistics [28:05] and so how do you see that in connection to Hurston's work in terms of producing, um, a better or more comprehensive picture of how you can engage in academic work, um, community work, and activism? Michele Berger: Yeah, so...these debates get, uh, hardened and solidified depending on where you are, right? Tiffany Pennamon: Mm-hm. Michele Berger: So in political science, just the name alone suggests that there's one legitimate way to do certain kinds of work. And so most of my career, I've sort of pushed back on those notions, um, and what I, what I sug-, train graduate students, um, in and, and undergraduates, you want a broad, [methodological 28:46] toolkit. Tiffany Pennamon: Mm-hm. Michele Berger: Um, sometimes the story you wanna tell, like if you go to the state legislature and you want to, um, make a case for rapidly moving on, um, DNA rape kits, right? Well, you might need to make an argument that involves, you know, kind of a quantitative argument. However, to study systematic, um, systematic, historical, complex forms of oppression, um, depending on the question you're asking, qualitative methods can be highly suited to giving a much more, you know, richly nuanced, richly textured, um, broad picture of what, what people – to me, it's like what the lived experience is, right? So we get from quantitative data, we can tell, um, really important things, um, so the, the book that I'm – the academic book I'm working on is how African-American mothers and, and their teenage daughters talk to each other. And, um, and that wants to intervene in the conversation about racial and gender health disparities, right? 'Cause we have all these really scary facts and figures, um, about obesity, about diabetes, but until you understand, how do, at least in the group that I'm looking at, um, how do African-American mothers navigate the healthcare system, which you can't necessarily get at just through statistics or quantitative work alone. You don't really have a sense of what doctors are saying to them, what they think about what their doctors are saying to them, um, how they then talk to their daughters about what doctors are saying to them or how they think about their own health so, um, it's really important to have, um, to me, a really broad and rich set of [methodological 30:45] tools. And Zora Neale Hurston was so wise and smart in, um, learning ethnographic mes-, methods and, and then employing them to make visible hidden communities. Tiffany Pennamon: Mm-hm. Michele Berger: Or marginalized communities. Tiffany Pennamon: Yes. And we see that just with the preservation and the [inaudible 31:03] of her historic Eatonville, [31:05] and so what does a festival like the Zora festival really do in terms of furthering her legacy, um, furthering her connection to Afrofuturism, especially with the theme of this year's conference? Michele Berger: Well, this is a spectacular moment, um, for the organizing committee, right, because, um, so for example, myself, I would've loved to come to the Zora Neale Hurston Festival. I knew about it years go and just could not get here. Um, the fact that now Afrofuturism, because of its visibility in the, in the wider culture, that's gonna draw people in. And then, if – even if people don't know anything about Zora Neale Hurston, that allows for the next, uh, kind of a layering of her work. That just wouldn't be possible, right? I mean, I, I can't, I can't think of any other theme that – particularly for, you know, African-American folks and even the broader community that it so, so speaks to the moment that we're in, um, so I, I just, I think that having this longstanding commitment to Afrofuturism is just going to bring in, um, also more creatives or people who iden-, who identify as creatives bring in, um, more, you know, young people, um, who really kinda see themselves as wanting to do big things, right, and if we can remind people of how big Zora Neale Hurston's legacy really is and couple that with Afrofuturism, I just – I think that it, it really is a, a right moment for many, many communities to get engaged. Tiffany Pennamon: Yes. And since we are running a little bit close to your reading time, uh, my last question, um, [32:49] what will you be talking about today later in your reading and what do you think that, um, future generations of black thinkers can really learn from, um, contemporary Afrofuturists and Zora Neale Hurston herself? Michele Berger: Mm-hm. So I'm on a panel, in just a few minutes, about what is Afrofuturism, and I would like the panelists to drill down a little bit more about how they came to that – their own understanding of it, how it's maybe being used in a marketing sense that may or may not serve more liberatory purposes. And then I'm on a panel on, um, women in Afrofuturism and I'm gonna be talking about some of the things that we shared here about what kinds of, um, narratives it helps us to see that aren't reflected in the, in more speculative fiction. Um, and, and then the last part of your question was about the kinda connection to Zora Neale Hurston? Tiffany Pennamon: Yes. [33:48] So what do you think black thinkers or future generations of black thinkers can really learn from her? Michele Berger: Oh, my goodness. Two – a couple of t-, a couple of things. So she has a very famous quote that s-, that says, um, "Research is formalized curiosity, and you have to go poking and prodding," and I think that's really important that to, um, not be dull and, and by dull, I mean not be anesthetized by culture, right, because Zora Neale Hurston was always curious about everything and everyone around her, um, and that's how you come out with new ideas, um, and her persistence, you know. I think as a creative person, um, she models for us, you know, she had patrons, she worked with literary giants in her era, she found ways to support herself, you know, way before like we think about like indie writers and [self-poetry 34:43]. She was doing all of that. Um, and she fought for her right to be at the table, um, and I, and I think that's, that's a really important thing for us as well to, to recognize we deserve to be at the table, we have really important ideas, and to be persistent in our creative work and to, to push back on status quo thinking. [laughter] Tiffany Pennamon: Thank you so much for speaking with me Dr. Berger. Michele Berger: Thank you so much for this interview. Tiffany Pennamon: [laughter] All right. /tl