Tina Campt

EO

How has education informed your practice?

TC

I got into four colleges. Georgetown was my safety school, but growing up in D.C., it was just too close to home. I really wanted to go to Barnard. So my dad bought me a train ticket to New York to go to the prospective students weekend. I got off the train, walked into the Barnard Hall, looked around for the registration table—and immediately panicked. I walked back out to a payphone, called my godmother in Hempstead, and said, “Come get me. If I go to Barnard, I’ll end up a heroin addict, and you’ll be very sad that I did not fulfill my potential.” I was terrified of New York City. She picked me up, and I spent a lovely weekend in Queens. That’s when I knew I couldn’t live in the city. Then I visited Swarthmore, which I loved on paper, but it felt too tiny. And I skipped the prospective students’ weekend at Vassar because I thought, If I don’t like it, I’ll have nowhere to go and I won’t go to college. [Laughs.] So I just showed up. And to my surprise, I loved it, even though it was torturous. It was socially intense in all the wrong ways.

At Vassar, I was one of the only people I knew who had gone to a public high school. Even with a high GPA and AP classes, I was completely unprepared for a world of privilege. I didn’t know what wealth looked like. It was disorienting to be surrounded by people with no material concerns, no awareness of constraints. It felt like a playground where everything was easy for everyone else, but not for me. It was a struggle. Still, I found a wonderful group of friends. And while I had always loved studying, I discovered a real love for research. I realized I was good at it—and relentless when it came to finding things out. I spent countless hours in the library, where research became a source of joy, pleasure, and mystery. I learned how to ask questions of history.

EO

What made you love history?

TC

I had a wonderful professor named Rhoda Rappaport, who taught a class on Reformation Europe that made me love history. The first thing she taught us was to ask questions of history as if it were not inevitable. Just because we know what happened doesn’t mean it had to happen. What a historian does is look at all the possibilities of what might have been and explain why those possibilities moved in one direction. It wasn’t about memory, remembering, or reconstruction. It was about understanding the choices individuals make and the consequences that bring us to the place we are now. Thinking about that opened an entirely new world to me. It was an approach to history that meant we are not trapped in it and that we can always, individually, make history. That was a revelation—that what had happened didn’t have to happen, and nothing has to happen unless we allow it to.

EO

Is that what led you toward intellectual history?

TC

Yes. I was captivated by the structuring architecture of the study of history. Intellectual history is a genre of historical study centered around the history of ideas, literature, and philosophy. All of these fall under the rubric of intellectual history. As an undergraduate, I studied the historiographical theories of Dominick LaCapra. I wrote my senior thesis applying his theories of intellectual history to the analysis of literature. That’s why I went to graduate school. I only applied to Cornell because I only wanted to study with him.

Before that, though, I went to work for the publisher Little, Brown. I was an editorial typist, back when there were typewriters. From there, I became an editorial assistant at Random House and worked at Vintage Books. I worked for some legendary editors. But most of my day was spent reading manuscripts, and I was the intermediary between the editorial and production teams, and I got to know a lot of authors. But I hated it because, not only was I making very little money, it was primarily a business and it wasn’t about ideas. And that’s when I asked myself, “What is it that you really love doing?” And I really loved research. I loved doing archival research. I loved asking questions. And so I went back to my undergraduate thesis and said, “Well, if you want to do this, then you want to do it with Dominick LaCapra.” In the late 1980s, you didn’t go to graduate school to get a job because there were no jobs. Nobody was hiring and nobody was retiring. You just went to graduate school as a way of figuring out what you wanted to do. I started working with Dominick, and I learned an entirely different vocabulary of theory. Though I did feel I felt incredibly out of place pretty much the whole the time I was in grad school.

EO

Was going to graduate school to figure things out common among your friends?

TC

When I graduated college, most of the people I knew did one of three things: they went to law school or became a paralegal in order to go to law school; they went into publishing; or they went out West, to California.

EO

What was the promise of the West?

TC

Those were the people who wanted to be artists or to go someplace cheap where they wouldn’t have to get a real job. Back then, San Francisco was a place where people could hustle. There’s always a place for each generation to go because it’s cheap. At one point it was New Orleans. Then there was a moment when it was Detroit. There was a moment when it was Baltimore. For my generation, it was the Bay Area.

EO

What did you take with you from your time in publishing?

TC

The capacity to edit the shit out of a manuscript. I’m an amazing editor—not so great with commas and punctuation, but I can shape a text. Arthur Jafa, a friend of mine, once told me he was having trouble seeing his way through a project, and I told him, “Stop thinking of yourself as a filmmaker. Think of yourself as an editor. You know you’re an amazing editor—be your own amazing editor.” That’s what I do. I get all the words down without too much thought, then I walk away. When I come back, I’m not the person writing—I’m the person editing. That’s what gives me real pleasure. Because editing is a form of thinking.

EO

When did you start studying German?

TC

I studied German at Vassar, alongside my major in European intellectual history. I was going to do a second major in German, but I broke my leg and I couldn’t take all the classes I needed. Still, I studied German throughout college and loved it. I had amazing teachers. One of them was a linguist and a brilliant language instructor. She came into the first class and said, “This is the only day I’m going to speak English to you. By the end of this year, you will be reading Goethe’s Faust.” She told us German is a structural language: everything has rules, and anything that doesn’t follow the rules fits into an exception you can memorize. “I will teach you the rules, and you will memorize the exceptions,” she said. And that just spoke to me.

Through her, I learned grammar’s specificities, which would become important in my later work. She gave us diagrams showing the structure of the nominative, dative, and genitive cases. I learned that German was a beautiful language. It has a visual structure, even in my mind. It was deeply satisfying. I went to Germany for the first time after I quit my job at Random House, on a summer language fellowship. I went again the summer before my qualifying exams. When I returned to the States, I started researching the history of the Black community in Germany and switched my advisor to Isabel Hull.

I went back to Germany three months after finishing my exams. That began seven years of living in Berlin. I arrived in 1990, just a year after the fall of the wall. It was a rough and tumble place and the racism was intense. It was a very different situation just a year before as East and West were still coming together. It was an amazing place, and I met a lot of people very quickly. That was also when Audre Lorde was spending time in Berlin. I met her when she would visit, because I was friends with her dear friends and publishers, Dagmar Schultz and Ika Hügel-Marshall. And there was an incredible Black feminist and feminist-of-color community back then.

EO

I love your writing around that and also on grammar. It’s in the quiet soundings. It just feels personal. The language isn’t performing; it feels like it’s describing the thing itself through the action.

TC

It goes back to the question that you asked me about writing. I learned how to write in Germany. I lost all anxiety about writing. When I was teaching, reading, and writing in German, it was challenging, but I was doing it. But then every time I would write something in English, it was so easy. It was so fluid. I was really confident about my voice in English when I was spending 24 hours a day reading, writing, teaching and explaining things in German. That was where I found my voice.

But it also had a lot to do with living the things I was writing about. This also informed my transition from being an oral historian to being someone who writes about art and visual culture. I started writing about photographs of the Black German community that revealed all these things they had experienced. Their words were incredibly powerful and precious, but the images that they shared really moved me. And part of that transition was moving from a mode of writing that was primarily analytical to a way of writing that was about affect and how and why things move us. That required me to write in a different voice because I had to position myself in relation to that sense of feeling moved.

EO

In some of your responses, you sound like an artist. It’s hard when you’re being primed for—or conditioned by—something you don’t yet have the language for.

TC

My approach to language is that theory doesn’t need to be a weapon. It doesn’t need to be a cudgel, to be more specific. I know and understand these concepts and terms, and they’re meaningful to me, but I’m not interested in using them for personal gain. What’s teacherly about me—and I do love teaching theory—is that I love giving people a concept they can use as a tool to open up the world. That’s what theory is to me: a can opener. Or a key to a vast kingdom. Using things as keys, instead of as hammers, is to me one of the most beautiful thing about being an academic and a theorist. I have keys I can actually distribute to these unsuspecting students. My great love is having a conversation where I get to explain the afterlife of slavery, or what performativity means, and someone says, “Oh wow! That make sense.” On the other hand, there’s the writing. Writing is to me, about addressing someone and not just explaining something.

EO

Who do you write to?

TC

When I’m writing about visual culture, I'm writing to the artwork itself. I’m writing to the artist. Or I’m writing to the person in the photograph—who they were at that moment, who they might have wanted to be, and who they perhaps couldn’t be. It’s very important to me to write to someone, because at first, when I was writing about vernacular photography, I was often writing about anonymous people, people I didn’t know or couldn’t identify. The only way to be accountable to those folks—who are still people, regardless of whether they’re here or not and regardless of whether we know their names—is to honor them. So I write to them. I don’t write about them as if they’re objects. It’s the same with artists. I can’t write about their work as if they were dead. Most of the people I write about are living artists. It’s a conversation and as part of that conversation, I have to acknowledge and respect the fact that I don’t know everything. And that’s the voice I try to write with—a voice that’s accountable to people, to artists, to the work and to the images, as well as the feelings and the discomfort I cycle through in any encounter.

EO

What was happening when you went to Berlin?

TC

When I got there, my individual focus was on the history of the Black German community—not only in the archive, but through as many voices as possible that had been excluded from it. At the time when I was doing my research, the history of the Black German community only appeared in official documents as negative or problematic. And I couldn’t accept that. I wanted to talk to people. I was an oral historian, first and foremost back then, and to be an oral historian means talking to people. So I went directly to Dagmar Schultz, Ika Hügel-Marshall, May Ayim, Katharina Oguntoye and a group of Black German women who had been trying to write this history and make the idea of an Afro-German, or a Black German community, something that was recognized, acknowledged and embraced. In turn, they connected me to others, mostly women. They linked me to an earlier generation of Black German women that had formed around Audre.

These women came to articulate what it meant to be Black German because they had met Audre when she came to Berlin and taught them about poetry. It was remarkable. They were reading her work and reading about Black feminism. Through her, the Black German movement got its steam. She came to Berlin to teach, but once she got cancer, she started coming more often for treatment. And I was part of a group of people for whom, when Audre came, it was a party. It was extraordinary. It was a kind of collective project of celebrating Black womanhood in Germany. I was a researcher at the time. I got my first teaching job at the Technical University of Berlin in the Women’s Studies program. I taught there for three years and then decided I didn’t want to be an expat.

EO

How was Audre received by the community in Berlin while you were there?

TC

Audre was very humble. She was also sick when I knew her. But even while she was getting treatment she was absolutely revered. They would have these great big parties. It’s funny, because I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the movie. There’s a documentary Dagmar Schultz made and co-wrote with Ika Hügel-Marshall, called Audre Lorde—The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992 about Audre’s time in Berlin. In the opening scene, there’s a dance party at Dagmar’s house. And I’m in that opening scene as one of the people at the dance party. But that was pretty typical, that she would come and they would have a party. I can remember many long evenings where we’d have fabulous conversations and cooked wonderful meals together. It was lovely. So again, she was revered, but she was also a mentor and a friend by many people in that community.

EO

How did Listening to Images change your project and platform as a thinker?

TC

Listening to Images started out as a series of blog posts I was asked to write for the Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland. I actually had to look up what a blog post was and how to write one—I’d never done it before. It ended up being five posts, which I wrote while I was traveling. I would sit down at a café and write something based on artwork I was seeing or thinking about that week.

EO

Can you also tell me why you wrote it?

TC

I can’t really tell you why I wrote it. With every book I’ve ever written, I didn’t really know it was going to be a book. Each one began as a series of essays and that was the case with all of my books except for my first one, which was my dissertation. The other three began as essays, which I literally printed out and laid on the floor to try to find a thread. When I see the thread, I start revising so the through line becomes clearer.

With Listening to Images, I was trying to move beyond Image Matters, which was about family photographs. I realized that the feeling of being moved by a photograph—or by a work of art—had to do with certain frequencies that they activate in us. It was the idea of connecting with a photograph that seemed so familiar even when it captured strangers that was really important to me. I didn’t know any of these people, but I was feeling a connection with them through their photos.

EO

You needed to get Image Matters out of the way so you could write about the process—and the politics—of writing that book.

TC

Yeah. And there’s a way in which Listening to Images really stripped down. Those images wrote through me, rather than me writing about them. The book is quite literally a series of encounters, and the reader is walking with me. That was important to me because the whole book is about embodiment. It’s about what it means to be physically present and in relation—to your own time, and to the time and place of another.

EO

What was it like being in those galleries and writing in front of the work?

TC

I want to be with the work. It’s a space-claiming gesture. I didn’t grow up seeing art. I didn’t grow up feeling welcome in galleries. I’m not trained as an art historian, so going into those spaces has always been incredibly awkward for me. Writing from the perspective of the encounter is a necessary part of articulating that relationship.

EO

It’s fieldwork.

TC

You’re absolutely right, because I also write about the way I see people interacting with art. Again, I write about it as an encounter. It’s a confrontation with something beyond the object itself—something in excess of it. In the gallery, I’m encountering the artist, the photographer, and the person who actually wants this photograph to be made. That’s what a gallery allows us to inhabit.

But I'm also trying to share what it does to me, so that the reader can think about what their own encounter with art does for them—or does for us. The idea of writing to something or someone also allows me to implicate myself. And I have to be implicated because if I'm not, then the reader won’t feel it— they won’t be moved by it. And to me, it’s all about making contact. How do artworks make contact with us? I could talk about what I see, but I care more about how these things feel. What is the impression or imprint that they leave on us? How does it change me? What does it allow me to see and how does it allow me to see my world differently? It’s not simply viewing a film, seeing a performance, or looking at a sculpture. By having an encounter with an artwork, it changes how I see myself in my world. What's important to me is that something changes through these encounters, if we let it. It’s for this reason that I don’t call myself an art critic. I prefer “art writer,” because I only write about artwork that moves me.

EO

How did you meet art?

TC

Art found me through Listening to Images. I was interested in identification photography, like passport photos, and the way artists use vernacular photography helped me understand their power. And I was struck by how Santu Mofokeng uses the vernacular photography of South Africa, how Martina Bacigalupo uses cutout photographs. That’s what led me to write about art. I was trying to understand identification photography and it was artists who were teaching me how powerful it was. That’s what gave me the courage to go to galleries and museums to see what artists were doing with these orphan photographs—how they were creating the conditions for us to feel them or hear them, and how they force us to listen to them. I was already beginning to write about that, but artists just blew it open.

EO

I want you to talk about Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten. Saidiya’s Wayward Lives dealt with a similar framework. How did you all come into communion as theorists?

TC

I can’t say much about Fred. His book was an inspiration to me. He came right as I was leaving Duke—we may have overlapped for a year. His book enabled me to say things about sound that I’d wanted to say for a long time. Saidiya and I have known each other for a very long time. We were friends when I was in Santa Cruz and she was at Berkeley. We moved to New York within a year of each other. We were both writing at the same time and needed writing partners. I needed somebody to read, and she needed somebody to read, so we would exchange work. We’ve always been close, but that made us closer. She gave me a conceptual framework that allowed me to understand more of the historical relationship of Black folks in the present.

I’m a historian, but I’m not an American historian. I’m not a historian of African American history. The last American history course I took was in high school. That's something people don’t quite understand about being a historian: you’re not a historian of the planet—you specialize. I can chapter and verse you on German history and much of European history, but I am less solid on American history. Saidiya is a phenomenal American historian. She’s a cultural historian, a literary critic, a feminist theorist—but above all, she’s an extraordinary historian of African American life. It’s through her work that I came to a deeper understanding of American history. We’re united in a deep investment in the power of forgotten archives.

EO

Or living as a project of archiving.

TC

Right. That’s where we are both fanatical: in what it means to speak to and from the archive, and to create a different relationship to it. That’s the core of our communion. Saidiya creates an encounter in Wayward Lives through a narrative that places us within the vantage point of those who don't get to speak. That’s what I was also trying to do. I was trying to bring into voice people who are understood to be mute or erased. I do it through photographs; in Wayward Lives, Saidiya did it through her girls, and accounts of them and their social workers.

And that remains our communion: what does it mean to voice the voiceless? That doesn’t mean speaking for them or on their behalf. That’s one of the things that’s important about listening—and about trying not to write about, but to write to. The register we choose to write in is as powerful as the topic or the objects we’re writing about.

EO

When did you encounter Scenes of Subjection? You were in Berlin in the 1990s. It came out in ’97. Did you immediately meet the book?

TC

I didn’t meet Scenes of Subjection until I got to California. I was in Germany for seven years, from 1990 to ’97, and it wasn’t until I got back that I started reading a whole bunch of stuff I couldn’t get when I was there. It was a history lesson for me—an extraordinary lesson on American history. I was so focused on Germany that I lost sight of the United States. It sounds harsh, but I was in exile for seven years, trying to understand what it meant to live in Germany as a Black woman.

EO

I sense that from your work—it’s not really American. I never really thought about it. Saidiya is an American historian and speaks with an American vernacular of Blackness.

TC

Our friendship began when she was in Berkeley and I was in Oakland—that’s when we started reading each other. Things deepened when we were finally back in the same place, when we both got back to New York. We were in touch the entire time I was at Duke and she was still at Berkeley.

And when we both got here, we started working, teaching, writing, and editing things together. When I started directing the Barnard Center for Research on Women—where I finally ended up teaching after all—we founded the Practicing Refusal Collective. That’s when we began doing a lot more work to use the platform to think about anti-Blackness through a Black feminist frame.