English professor Ifoema Nwankwo draws on her Jamaican roots in her groundbreaking research

by Ann Marie Deer Owens
photo by Daniel Dubois
additional photography by Lucius Outlaw Jr.

Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo credits her Jamaican grandparents with nurturing her keen interest in uncovering the neglected histories of past generations, especially those of African and Caribbean descent, and preserving their stories.

The associate professor of English is the principal investigator and founding director of Voices from Our America, a project to advance cross-cultural and cross-generational understanding among the peoples of the United States, the Caribbean and Latin America.

“I developed a deep respect for my elders while growing up with my grandparents in Jamaica,” Nwankwo said. “Without the stories that they told me, there is no way I would have become the person I am today.” Nwankwo has recorded more than 75 interviews for the project since 2007, two-thirds of which were focused on individuals over the age of 65.

“Voices from Our America is one of the promising initiatives at Vanderbilt for transforming how humanities research is integrated into undergraduate and graduate education,” said Jay Clayton, chair of the English department. “It highlights the relevance of field work to a literary discipline and demonstrates the value of a cultural approach to public issues today.”

The project is focusing first on Panamanians of West Indian descent – the heirs of British West Indians who came to Panama to work for United Fruit Company or build the Panama Railroad or Panama Canal.

The workers were given both true and false promises about the opportunities that awaited them in Panama, particularly in the early 1900s. Workers in the Canal Zone, which was considered United States territory, suffered under Jim Crow segregation laws.

The project lends insight into the impact of that history of contact with U.S. culture, exposure to Caribbean cultural heritage and the particular demands of Panamanian society on lives and identities. It is interdisciplinary in both vision and analytical approach.

“We use a standardized questionnaire, an approach that differentiates the project from traditional oral history,” Nwankwo said. “However, the language of the questionnaire recalls ethnography, and the depth of the answers and insight into processes of self-fashioning that the questionnaire works to elicit is much more in line with what one would expect from an autobiography.”

The aim is to capture a range of individual viewpoints and experiences, rather than to gather a perfectly representative sample of the population. The result is a new and unique set of primary sources that can make for more informed and balanced scholarly and policy approaches to engaging the community.

Questions range from memorable childhood experiences to deeper ones about how individuals express and enact their culture and history. Nwankwo recorded the first 35 conversations on video.

Lucius Outlaw Jr., associate provost for undergraduate education, spent three days in Panama taking photographs of the project. Exhibitions of Outlaw’s photos with accompanying quotations and other material are planned for Panama and the Vanderbilt community as a prelude to more scholarly research and analysis.

“Ifeoma’s research looks, in particular, at descendants of the people who were transported from Africa to the Caribbean region and later migrated to Panama,” Outlaw said. “When the interview transcripts are completed, we will work to develop a ‘world view’ analysis of their thoughts and values and the evolution of their approaches to the world as they moved from one place to another.” He noted that Nwankwo has provided a window on a group of people in the Americas who have received relatively little attention in the past.  

The Voices from Our America project also has an active learning component. Information collected from the interviews is being packaged into forms that are the basis of collaborations with local organizations, community education events and curriculum development workshops for teachers. “We also plan to disseminate the information through scholarly articles, a book of interviews and a digital library,” Nwankwo said. 

The project’s team members include Panama project manager Nyasha Warren, a Harvard alumna who specializes in curriculum and community education; Veronica Forte, a university-level English as a second language professor; and KCB Consulting, a community outreach and development firm. Among the project’s local partners is the Society of Friends of the West Indian Museum of Panama.

Destiny Birdsong, a Vanderbilt third-year doctoral student in English, serves as the project’s research coordinator. She said the interviews span several generations, ranging from a man in his 90s who started working as the canal company’s office messenger when he was 14 to West Indian Panamanians who grew up in the Canal Zone during the 1950s.

Voices from Our America furthers the work of higher education institutions by linking research, K-12 curriculum development and community education.

“The project embodies the emergent field of ‘public humanities,’ providing a distinctive way for Vanderbilt to take its place among other top universities that have embraced this burgeoning approach to understanding the humanities’ work in the world,” Nwankwo said. She said she got key support from the College of Arts and Science, Provost Richard McCarty and the Center for the Americas at Vanderbilt.

The second core part of Voices from Our America is called African American Worldviews. It focuses on indigenous U.S.-African American relationships with the world, particularly with the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean.

“I’m trying to highlight the reality that the identity of this community has always been shaped to some degree in relation to ‘foreign’ communities, whether within or beyond our borders,” Nwankwo said. “Sometimes these relationships have been productive, and sometimes these relationships have been less than productive, but it is absolutely crucial to understanding the history of the African American community that we are attentive to these historical and contemporary relations.”

Nwankwo said that Americans’ initial complex reaction to Barack Obama demonstrates the relevance of the questions posed by the project. Having foreign ancestry and the affection of many people abroad became an issue during Obama’s presidential campaign. One reason, she said, was that the relationship between foreignness and being accepted as authentically black and authentically American remains unsettled in the United States.

Posted 11/01/08