Faculty Profile: Linda-Susan Beard

Linda-Susan Beard focuses her teaching and research on post-colonial literatures, South African and African American literature, and contemplative intelligence. She also co-founded Emmaus Monastery, a contemplative, monastic community in rural Michigan.

The question

鈥淔or far too many Americans, slavery is an opaque abstraction hidden in a sanitized and seemingly unknowable past.鈥�

the family tree

鈥淢y father, who passed away last July in the 102nd year of his life, had a slave grandfather we have traced ... and we believe that we know one of the masters who owned us: the Baird family.鈥� (Read more about this connection.)

Exceptional Amnesia

鈥淭he single narrative we have inherited about American exceptionalism has always been self-serving and amnesiac about this ugly chapter of our history, with its unexplored vantage of white hegemony鈥攅ven in the anti-slavery struggle鈥攁nd its myopia that continues to dismiss Black achievement against the odds.鈥�

Exodus

鈥淭he favorite biblical text of the slave was Exodus. It is the remarkable indomitability of the human spirit that we study, even in the midst of life-threatening and mortal abuse in the attempt to destroy the slave鈥檚 sense of self.鈥�

Past, Present, Future

鈥淲e are bound together in our narrative of the past; we are also yoked in the present and in the futures we choose to imagine together.鈥�