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Cornell poet’s play “Trap Door” opens an aperture into Ithaca history
“Trap Door,” a “headphone walking play” that opens May 20 in downtown Ithaca, invites audiences to notice the streets they travel, said Cornell poet Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon.
“Meandering these streets, one might happen upon a landmark site or a name easily recognized. But how many stories go untold? Which ones have slipped into gaps in history? What place do such silences hold in shaping a community?” said Van Clief-Stefanon, associate professor of literatures in English and lead writer of the play. “‘Trap Door offers an aperture: one the walking play format encourages us to pass through, allowing us to see our surroundings in a new light.”
Have Black Lives Matter protests changed the curriculum?
In 1903 the African-American sociologist WEB Du Bois coined the term ‘double consciousness’. American racism, he said, forced African-Americans to see themselves two ways. Among themselves, they were wives, husbands, friends, children. At the same time, America’s racial apartheid, ‘Jim Crow’, forced African-Americans to measure themselves as White America did, that is, with “contempt”.
While discussing with African-American scholars how last spring’s Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests affected the curriculum in universities across North America, I was brought face to face with a latter-day version of ‘double consciousness’.
When speaking about how their teaching and assignments are designed to chip away at racism, the African-American professors Anthony Pinn of Rice University in Houston, Texas, and Ebony McGee of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, sounded much like Professor Alexandra Rut