“studying shange” – working title
studying shange is a docu-series that hopes to capture and explore the ways in which new scholarship in created in the 21st century. The project seeks to answer the questions: “What does it mean to build scholarship and an archive of a living artist and scholar? (How) Does the student as collaborator methodology work in an undergraduate setting? Are Shange’s answers the only answers to questions the academic and cultural worlds have about her work? Where does her opinion factor in to the process of building scholarship? It will include interviews with the students in the Digital Shange Seminar. Students will discuss their individual archival projects as well as the process of the class itself. How did they come to selecting the projects to which they’ve ascribed themselves? How has their experience of the class and as academic collaborators been so far? Extra-university collaborators will explain how they’ve made the digital archiving process possible. I will also interview Professor Hall and others who initiated the study, and even Ntozake Shange herself.