To date Free Black Space has published 185 posts over the past six years. Since July of 2014 our hits have risen from 3,000 to over fifty thousand. Our goals in 2016 are to publish a minimum of thirty authors in addition to the twenty authors published so far.
Presented here is a author spotlight on Dr. Valerie Sweeney-Prince. Dr. Prince has composed a wide variety of articles on Free Black Space. You can find a list of them at the end of her biography. Free Black Space encourages you to check out her work here and in print.
Valerie Sweeney Prince is the author of Burin’ Down the House: Home in African American Literature published by Columbia University Press in 2005. Her manuscript, The Daughter’s Exchange: The African American Woman’s Encounter with the Intellectual Marketplace, was selected as a finalist in Vanderbilt University’s Issues in Critical Investigations 2011 manuscript competition. In summer 2014, Prince received funding from the Mellon Foundation to work with an undergraduate student to create a database compiling data on metaphor in STEM fields. In the classroom, Prince has been using the science of metaphor as a means of helping students uncover meaning.
David M. Wyatt, the editor of American Literature in Transition’s volume on the 1960s, has invited Prince to contribute a chapter on Civil Rights. The series is to be published by Cambridge University Press. Another expression of her research interests is through creative non-fiction writing, which centers on issues of home. Prince explored the construct of home in both her dissertation and in Burnin’ Down the House: Home in African American Literature. The shift from literary analysis to creative non-fiction allows for further study of this vital site. Her essay, “Empty Vessel (in three pieces),” was published later in New Writing: The International Journal for the Theory and Practice of Creative Writing. Prince’s creative non-fiction explores aspects of home and family as they are re-membered. The idea of re-membering is derived from Toni Morrison who insists in Beloved that the trauma of slavery and the Middle Passage have left African Americans in desperate need of a “rememory.” The past is alive in the present and that past demands recollection. This work of memory is particularly necessary for a people whose domestic experiences are circumscribed by a peculiar trauma. Domestic experiences can be remembered through an exploration in writing. Writing has the possibility of constructing new architectures with the capacity of opening up vital corridors for a people who historically have been sorely used.
A significant portion of Prince’s research agenda is dedicated to the study of metaphor. The connection between the creative non-fiction essays and the research on metaphor is not obvious. But the path may not be as meandering as it seems. Prince found her way to metaphor by way of Virginia. Her interest in Virginia is directly linked to her research on home. Bernice Johnson Reagon says that African Americans have roots in Virginia, referencing its significant historical role in the slave trade. In fact, Reagon is right in regards to her own family. Generations of her father’s family were born in Virginia. What’s more, she graduated from Hampton University in Virginia (which alumni call “our home by the sea”), one of her children was born in Virginia, and as an adult she lived in Virginia for many years. The significance of Virginia in her own genealogy is reinforced through the literature that emerges out of her culture. For instance, Virginia captivates Toni Morrison in Song of Solomon. In that novel, Virginia is the threshold through which the flying African Solomon passes on his way home. While the geography is imagined the route is well established. Virginia is the threshold. It is the doorway through which twenty Africans passed in 1619 at Old Point Comfort in the infancy of chattel slavery and so quite naturally Morrison represents Virginia as the launching point for a man who is quite done with this business of slavery.
Virginia is everywhere—in the literature, in her family history, where she went to school, where she returned to work, in African American history, in national history. The earliest cartographers identified the land across the Atlantic as Virginia, imagining it stretching from sea to sea. But that was the problem. It was way too much—this Virginia—a sign of colonial ambition and full of hubris. It was unmanageable. So Prince searched for a way to manage Virginia and found her way to metaphor.
What developed in response to the confusion produced by the unwieldiness of colonial ambitions is a systematic approach to manage notions that are too large to contain. Clearly, Virginia is not simply a state in the Union; Virginia operates metaphorically. But the thing about metaphor is that it is rooted in human cognition. Though essential to the way people navigate language, the process transcends the use of language and permeates most human activities.
Prince has been a fellow at Harvard University’s W. E. B. DuBois Institute, a visiting scholar at the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute, and the Avalon Professor of Humanities at Hampton University. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan in English Language and Literature. Prince is currently an Associate Professor of English at Allegheny College.
Below are links to Dr. Prince's posts here on Free Black Space
Cargo Billups Goes Looking for Lips
I Want to Give Up Christmas
What's in a Name
Review of Toni Morrison's God Help the Child
Short Take-Ben Williams at Bohemian Caverns
Metaphor is Hard Science
Review of Matt Johnson's Pym
Race is Dead Metaphor
Criminalizing Mothers
After Rape: Free Black Space
A Review of Colson Whiteheads's Sag Harbor
Free Black Space: Precious, Push and Monique
Law No Order a Review of Toni Morrison's Home
Dr. Prince's Notes on the Salon
