Down South Dirt with Ashon Crawley

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?

Down South Dirt is the first installment of Crawley’s public events during the 2024-’25 Keohane Professorship at Duke and UNC, collectively titled Otherwise, We are Down South Folk—Dirt, Water, Air

Presented by DukeArts and the Duke Office of the Provost

Parking for this event is free.

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 Press), an investigation of aesthetics and performance as modes of collective, social imagination; and The Lonely Letters (Duke University Press), an epistolary exploration of the interrelation of blackness, mysticism, quantum mechanics and love. He is currently working on a third book, tentatively titled “Made Instrument” (WW Norton), about the impact of the AIDS crisis for black social life. Entering the conversation by considering musicians, singers and choir directors that labored for black churches, “Made Instrument” explores the ways gender, sex, sexuality remain unthought and untheorized but are no less real practices of the living and the dead. A multidisciplinary artist working in the visual and the sonic, Crawley is a Yaddo interdisciplinary arts fellow, a MacDowell interdisciplinary arts fellow, and a New City Arts Initiative Fellow, a LIT (Learning It Together) Artist Fellow and his work has been featured on the National Mall in Washington DC, at Second Street Gallery and Welcome Gallery both in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Bridge Projects and the California African American Museum both in Los Angeles, California. All his writing and his approach to art practices is about what he calls otherwise possibility.