Hosted by the Humanities Center and graduate fellow, Maya Brown-Boateng. Respondents includes Gretchen Bender from History of Art and Architecture and Aaron Johnson from the Department of Music. This event will be hybrid, so you can attend it either in person in 602 CL or via Zoom as you prefer.

With over 35 years of experience within the Pittsburgh banjo community, Dr. Joan Dickerson expresses a passion for the banjo and its history through her commitment to education and musicianship. As a Black woman, she navigates the intersections of race and gender by negotiating the joys and discomforts of various banjo performance spaces. Dr. Dickerson specializes in the classic banjo technique—a style characterized by its use of popular music repertoire from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, and its historical associations with “modernizing” the banjo through high-class expressions of parlor music, dance orchestras, and glee club ensembles (Linn, 1994). Drawing from personal conversations and her private archive, this paper presents a biographical view of Dr. Dickerson’s decades-long contributions to Pittsburgh’s banjo scene, and it extends the discussions about women in banjo across racial and historical politics. It argues that Dickerson’s archive demonstrates what David Scott would call an “archaeology of black memory,” or a collection of materials that demonstrate an imagination of a “counter-memory” to the deracination of the banjo (Scott, 2008). Dr. Dickerson’s life offers an incredible record of resilience and musical collaboration that allows us to reimagine the banjo as a material object that mediates personal, social, political, and cultural relationships.

Precirculated material for this colloquium will be available here about two weeks prior and up to the event.