A Charge to Keep
2016-2019

A Charge to Keep is a digital archive I created in collaboration with the Spiritual Technologies Project, a research and performance consortium I co-founded in 2013. This work was supported by multiple national grants (Ford, Surdna, and Nathan Cummings Foundations) and included partnerships with cultural organizations including the Gullah/Geechee Nation and the Mississippi Center for Cultural Production. Featured artists include members of the McIntosh County Shouters (NEA Heritage Fellows) and the Head of the Gullah/Geechee nation, Queen Quet.

This project centered on an exploration of the waning tradition of hymn lining in Black churches in the Southern U.S. We sought to document how the form was currently practiced, gather community opinions on how to sustain the tradition, theorize the metaphysical dimensions of the practice, and explore how the tradition might be used outside of a church context (e.g. community organizing or protest). We developed this work through multiple fieldwork excursions to coastal communities in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina. During these trips, we did individual and group interviews, conducted in situ observation and audio/video recording in churches, and developed community partnerships that led to multiple public events. Based on this work, we argue that congregational singing is a “cultural technology” historically honed to transform individuals into a collective spiritual body, a process that can also be applied in other, non-religious spaces. As a second phase of the project, we co-organized events with participants in multiple sites during which we shared the finished films and website, hosted a community meal, and held a celebratory group sing.

A Charge to Keep is undergirded by three theoretical and methodological approaches. First, we used Participatory Action Research to inform our modes of interactions with people in our research sites. In particular, we emphasized ongoing conversation with the communities in which we studied and the co-creation of scholarship. Second, we drew on Collective Ethnography in the ways in which we did our research. Key to this method was jointly conducting interviews and participant-observation in the same sites (versus contributing data from multiple individually-engaged sites). Finally, we grounded our work in a theoretical concept I developed, Speculative Analysis, inspired by Afrofuturist theoretical readings of Black science and speculative fiction texts. Speculative Analysis is research that not only points to what exists but also to what new things can be brought into being. This method recognizes that a researcher inevitably changes a site and asks how to better manage or harness this dynamic. It also opens up space for scholarly projects to serve community-defined goals that actively change rather than passively describe a site or text.

My co-investigators for this study were Michaela Leslie-Rule (sociologist and filmmaker) and Ron Ragin (artist and arts administrator). While we did not sharply divide our roles on the project, I was primarily charged with developing our research questions, ethnographic methodologies, and leading many of our interview and participant-observation engagements. I created the majority of our written output, including all of our scholarly pieces (public talks and future publications). I also handled our audio recording, editing, and web design. I assisted Ron and Michaela with video set up, conception, and editing. Ron generally took the lead on developing connections with community partners and Michaela with the video components. We all participated in the building and public sharing of creative components.