![]() ![]() As if these projects were not enough, an unanticipated Berlin Prize fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin for the spring of 2021 prompted me to resume work on an interpretive history of the Black diaspora in modern Europe that I have started and put aside numerous times over the past two decades. Current developments in Russia have reminded me that Abram’s son Ivan Hannibal, a general and admiral, founded the city of Kherson during the expansion of Russia under Catherine the Great, which, as I write, is a fiercely contested city in Vladimir Putin’s current attempt at Russian expansion. The single most revered figure in Russian cultural history, Pushkin was of Black African ancestry through his maternal great-grandfather Abram Hannibal, who rose from enslavement to Peter the Great to mathematician and major general as an engineer in the Russian army. What might I achieve with stories on an elementary level that accentuate the positive and highlight human potential for shaping a better world? Another pet project I have envisioned for decades is to translate into English poems of Alexander Pushkin that treat cultural diversity. The current resurgence of evidence that the American Civil War has never really been settled is just one reminder of this. I have also regretted seemingly always being the bearer of bad news, never having history to teach or stories to tell in my courses that have happy endings. ![]() As a college teacher, I’ve long desired to reach students earlier in their lives, when they may be more receptive to the multicultural messages I have to offer. I also wanted to try my hand at writing children’s stories. I wanted to write various types of songs and strengthen my rudimentary skills on the guitar and piano. In retirement, I hoped to turn to projects that I hadn’t had time for during my teaching career, both personal and academic. So another lesson learned for me is that assumptions made about freedom in retirement are often illusory. The virtual parallel reality fostered by COVID has made these activities even more feasible. I also continue to serve on the National Council on the Humanities, to which I was appointed by President Obama in 2011, keeping me connected to the teaching, research, and writing in the academic world. ![]() I have kept a lower profile sufficiently well to have an admirer of my work politely confess that he had thought I was deceased, but I still rarely experience a period without at least one manuscript review, conference paper, or guest lecture deadline. This leads me to repeatedly break my resolution to once and for all stop living under deadlines set by others. That played a role in my accepting this essay assignment-that, and constant reminders from my 94-year-old mother-in-law, Maudie, that it is healthy for the aging to keep the mind and body as active as possible. What has most caused my failure to advance my retirement plans is the second lesson I have learned about my relationship to the concept of retirement: old habits die hard, and I have never become good at saying no to worthy projects. The pandemic impeded my short bucket list of must-visit places, but the alluring features of their past glories had already been sullied anyway by the impact of environmental crises and political and cultural turmoil. Courtesy National Endowment for the Humanities Allison and Shirley Blakely at the 2018 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities. ![]()
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