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In 2019, the Department of the African American Studies had the pleasure of graduating the second cohort of AAS Concentrators. We have no doubt that these three scholars will continue to excel and make an impact in the world.

My grandmother always reminds me: you have lost your mother-tongue. When I return to Sri Lanka for brief visits, she tells me how I used to understand her. Like my nephews and nieces do now when I was a child, I would listen to spoken Tamil and reply in English. There is nothing I can say to her accusation except to agree. Yes, I have lost my mother tongue, the words, the sounds, the rhythms of speaking to which I was born. I willfully lost this language, after we moved to Australia where my voice, my skin, my body continually marked me as foreign, different, other. As we all know, primary school children can be cruel: losing my mother-tongue was a way to survive.

Morrison came to Princeton in 1989 to teach literature and creative writing. During her 17 years of teaching, she played a key role in expanding the University’s commitments to the creative and performing arts and to African American studies. In 1994, she founded the Princeton Atelier, which brings together undergraduate students in interdisciplinary collaborations with acclaimed artists. In 2016, Princeton University Library announced that the the major portion of the Toni Morrison Papers, which had been part of the permanent library collections since 2014, were open for research to students, faculty and scholars worldwide. (One item from the Morrison Papers, a handwritten manuscript draft of “Beloved,” is on view through June 23 in the exhibition “Welcome Additions: Selected Acquisitions 2012-18” in Firestone Library’s Milberg Gallery.) In 2017, the University dedicated the naming of Morrison Hall, formerly West College, in her honor.

The uncontested center of the black pulp fiction universe for more than four decades was the Los Angeles publisher Holloway House. From the late 1960s until it closed in 2008, Holloway House specialized in cheap paperbacks with page-turning narratives featuring black protagonists in crime stories, conspiracy thrillers, prison novels, and Westerns that gave readers an unfailing veneration of black masculinity. Zeroing in on Holloway House, Kinohi Nishikawa’s Street Players explores how this world of black pulp fiction was produced, received, and recreated over time and across different communities of readers.