An interview with Corey D. B. Walker, assistant professor in the department of Africana Studies at Brown University and author of the new book A Noble Fight: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America.
by Scott Poulson-Bryant
What inspired you to write A Noble Fight: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America?
I wrote A Noble Fight to challenge the uncritical, and often unqualified, praise of voluntary associations and other civil society groups in our public conversations about the challenges confronting the present condition of democracy in America. So often these conversations perpetuate the myths of American democracy while papering over the deep fractures and cleavages that continue to arrest the development of a robust democratic society.
According to your book, Freemasonry is a good metaphor for understanding American democracy. How so?
Early in A Noble Fight, I write that Freemasonry is democracy in full conceptual and symbolic regalia because its language of universality, equality, and morality echoes so much of the political language of modern democratic theory. Of course, it also embodies so many of the contingencies and contradictions that characterize the politics and the idea of the political in the modern world.
How important is ritual in the African American culture?
Just as it is for all cultures, ritual is very important in African American culture. A Noble Fight charts how the rituals of democracy are not only reinforced by the very mundane acts of the everyday, but also how African Americans have challenged and developed alternative meanings of these rituals by drawing from the deep theoretical and material wells of Freemasonry in promoting new conceptualizations of the meaning of democracy in the America.
Is it hard to balance writing with teaching?
I find that writing and teaching critically inform one another. The key question is the arbitrary deadlines imposed on the two that sometimes have them working against one another.
Has being at Brown influenced your writing/researching work?
I am glad to be at Brown and to be a member of a premier department of extraordinary intellectuals. To engage in the conversations, debates, and probing inquiries that are so much a part of the everyday culture of Churchill House is a gift that continues to critically inform my work as a scholar and, most importantly, a teacher. In many ways, this department has been very influential on A Noble Fight.
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Scott Poulson-Bryant, an adjunct professor in the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University, was a founding editor of VIBE Magazine. His books include HUNG: A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men In America and The VIPs, a novel scheduled for release in 2009.
(Thank you to Scott Poulson-Bryant and Brown University.–Ed.)
