Faculty Spotlight- Rashauna Johnson

1. How would you describe your scholarship and its evolution over the course of your career?

As a scholar of the African diaspora, I am interested broadly in people of African descent across time and space. My specific research interests began with Atlantic New Orleans, which anchored my dissertation and first book. My current project takes a broad perspective on a small, rural region. What is consistent across both projects is an interest in African diasporic Louisiana during slavery and after emancipation.

2. A major part of your research program is concerned with how scholars engage with the archival history of enslavement. In your view, what are the benefits and limitations of the archives for historians?

On the one hand, the archives still have a lot to tell us about the history of slavery and enslaved people’s experiences, and for deeply unfortunate reasons now more than ever it is important to be able to document key aspects of this history. On the other hand, as critical scholars rightly point out, the archives are certainly imperfect and do not capture the totality of anyone’s history, especially those of oppressed peoples. So, like many historians of the African diaspora before me, I take a “both-and” approach that combines archival and other, equally useful sources to craft something more satisfying than an “either-or” approach might allow. 

3. Your current book project explores the intersection of “family, race, and region in rural Louisiana.” Can you expand on the project and how these elements come into conversation? 

The project, which I am pleased to say is now forthcoming, is essentially a regional study of my maternal grandmother’s birthplace from the late eighteenth century to the dawn of the twentieth. It is not a traditional family history in the sense that it does not track one family over that entire time, though there is a family thread. I am more interested in the many different sets of peoples, empires, interests, and ambitions that came to shape this one place and in turn what that story tells us about modernity.

4. Your work also includes the history of incarceration, a subject that was evident is Slavery’s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age of Revolutions. How do the histories of incarceration and enslavement overlap and what contemporary implications does that have? 

When I started that research, I was familiar with a “plantation to prison” model that emphasized the rise of mass incarceration starting in the post-emancipation era. In my archival work, however, I found sources about incarcerated enslaved persons in early New Orleans. So rather than seeing slavery and mass incarceration as successive, I argued they were co-constitutive. This is not to say there were no differences between the slavery and post-emancipation contexts, but I wanted to think in more complex ways about the continuities and ruptures. I am glad to see that subsequent scholars continue to take up these kinds of questions.

5. In Slavery’s Metropolis, you emphasize that New Orleans (and Louisiana) stood out from the rest of the American south. What makes Louisiana different and how does its distinctiveness impact your work as a historian of Louisiana, the American south, and enslavement? 

Though I am a New Orleanian and I love my city, I try my best to push back against ideas of New Orleans exceptionalism. We have a lot of scholarship on what makes New Orleans unique, but I would rather emphasize the ways that city emerged thanks to a global set of material and political phenomena and the ways those structures continue to shape all life and especially Black life in that city, state, and region. So in the book I call New Orleans (and Louisiana) an exaggeration of, not an exception, to the larger processes that created the Atlantic world. I think this will come across even more forcefully in my current project.

6. Finally, your scholarship is a major component of what you do but so is teaching at UChicago. What do you find most valuable and rewarding about being an educator and mentor?

I love being a teacher, and we have such great students here. They ask insightful questions, they work hard, they do the reading. In my classes building community is a learning objective, so when I get to watch students interact it gives me hope that there is a future for reason, rigor, and respectfulness. That said, I do worry that as the faculty-to-student ratio changes and we all become increasingly overextended our capacity for the kind of in-depth mentoring for which we are known will decline.