Dartmouth Strategic Planning :: A Global Tapestry

A Global Tapestry

Antonio Tillis, associate professor of African and African American Studies, chair, African and African American Studies

When most of us think of the term “African American,” what we really think of is “African United Statesian.” Associate professor Antonio Tills, chair of African and African American Studies at Dartmouth, admits that as a student, he too limited his conception of “blackness” to the territory north of the Rio Grande. It was only in graduate school, when he stumbled across the rich literature of black protest movements in Latin America, that he changed his idea of what he calls “transnational blackness.” “Like many students in today’s context, I was not aware of the migratory patterns of Africans in the slave trade or the post-emancipation movement of African Americans in the Western Hemisphere,” he says. “Through these prolific writers, I found out about this encompassing notion of black revolutionary movements happening in Latin America in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s akin to the movements that were happening in the United States.” 

Tillis has since focused his work on bringing those movements to light. His first book, Manuel Zapata Olivella and the “Darkening” of Latin American Literature, examines the work of one of Colombia’s most important novelists, who called attention to the disenfranchisement of people of African descent in postcolonial South America. This year, he is publishing two new edited works—one a collection of critical essays on African Latin writers in English, the other on contemporary understanding of “blackness” in Brazil (inspired by the year he spent recently teaching in Brazil as a Fulbright scholar). “What these works hopefully do,” he says, “is bring into conversation these multiple geographical spaces and give the readership an understanding of how creative writers are dealing with the age-old issues of race and gender and nationality. It helps us understand what blackness is and what blackness ain’t, if you will, within a hemispheric conversation.” 

Tillis admits that it’s not always easy to engage Dartmouth students in an exploration of such unfamiliar cultures, and to get them thinking beyond their own concepts of what it means to be African American or Latino. In his courses, Tillis attempts to bridge those gaps by making the theoretical application as tangible as possible. “You have to make it carne y hueso,” he says. “It has to be the meat and bones.” One recent student, for example, came from a rural town in Montana; Tillis had her articulate what it was like to move to the Northeast where cultural expectations—and even the meaning of certain words—is different. From there, he was able to extrapolate theorizing the experience of a former African slave adjusting to Latin America. “Imagine when you have a hegemonically imposed language and a hegemonically imposed culture relative to your quotidian,” he says. “These are the kind of cultural transitions people have to adjust to and survive and create anew.” 

Through expanding those concepts in the minds of students, Tillis hopes he can better develop their critical thinking skills for an increasingly heterogeneous multicultural world. “I think the Dartmouth student of the future is going to be even more transnational and global than the Dartmouth student of today. The world is their tapestry and their playground much more so than the students of my generation,” he says. “The courses I teach give an understanding of some of the challenges and triumphs of these transnational cultures and hopefully give them a hunger—for lack of an erudite way of putting it—for the world.”