In this opening public event of the 2024-25 Keohane Professorship, interdisciplinary artist and scholar Ashon Crawley will present on the relation of dirt and soil to the making of Black life, and how degrading the earth is part of the attempt to unmake Black possibility. Thinking through “Cancer Alley” in Louisiana and soil erosion in Mississippi, what practices are available to help us conceive life otherwise?

About the Project:

“Down South Dirt” is the first installment of Crawley’s public events during the Keohane Professorship at Duke and UNC, collectively titled “Otherwise, We are Down South Folk—Dirt, Water, Air”

“Black folks have been severed from land, water, air. This is the fact of antiblack racism. Indigenous siblings in the Americas know this severance as well. In black, this has meant being forcibly transported from the African continent’s western coast to various ports and parts of the world. In the Americas, the ports and parts were primarily southern, down south, before such a concept even existed. The port is the meeting place of dirt, water and air through architectural design.Is there a wisdom, a thought practice, an approach to making things, that can prompt in us a way to move and think and do and be otherwise? Is there a wisdom, a thought practice, an approach to making things that not only lets us notice but lets us work against the continued antiblack racist imposition that severs us from dirt, water and air?”
—Ashon Crawley

In his interdisciplinary practice, Ashon Crawley will present work—from visual and sonic art to fiction and prose—arguing that a severed relation to land, water and air must be recovered for a thriving and joyful life. “This does not mean that Black people have not survived, nor thrived, that we have not enjoyed, nor had joyful lives. This does mean, however, that the thriving and enjoyment that has happened has occurred within the crucible and context of the epistemology of severance, forced separation, imposed and maintained by violent force,” explains Crawley. From the Northeast—New Jersey—but going down south almost yearly to visit family, Crawley asks how we carry down south in and with us, how it informs our aesthetic and intellectual practices, and how being and carrying down south in and with us can give us a way to think liberation as a practice.

Meet Ashon Crawley

Ashon Crawley

Ashon Crawley is Professor of Religious Studies and African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. He is author of Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (Fordham University …

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