Musician esperanza spalding Departs Harvard
Harvard Magazine| Nancy Welecki
“Five-time Grammy award winner and professor of practice in the Music Department, esperanza spalding (who does not capitalize her name)” has decided to leave Harvard “after multiple conversations with University officials about implementing her ‘Black Artist-Educators Decolonizing and Placemaking (BAEDAP)’ model, which she envisioned as either a course or initiative.”
As Welecki reports, “Under the BAEDAP model, Harvard would ‘rematriate’ some of its land and buildings, offering them as spaces where ‘Black and Native artists, scholars, students, activists, and cultural workers,’ as well as the broader Harvard and surrounding community, could collaborate and make art.”
According to spalding, “the model is ‘one approach to devising curricular pathways that might help institutions (and artist-faculty) move beyond metaphorical commitments to decolonial education, Black and Native solidarity (respectively), and reparations.”
“To remain in relationship to Harvard,” spalding explained , “I must be directly engaged in generative and reparative interventions to restructure and remediate the historical and lingering colonial impacts of this institution…[yet] there wasn’t a path forward for a BAEDAP-like practice at Harvard.”
In her BAEDAP proposal, spalding wrote, “I am no longer willing to endorse a cultural norm whereby artists & artist-educators passively participate-in, and benefit-from institutions born and bolstered through the justification, and/or ongoing practice of exploiting and destroying Black and Native life…Countless gifts have been delivered to humanity through this University, yet they cast a long shadow in light of Harvard’s origin, political history, and economic foundation inextricably linked to Black and Native subjugation.”
