Our April 2026 Departmental Spotlight features Darieck Scott, professor in African American Studies, interviewed by graduate student Endria Richardson.
Who do you love? Writers, thinkers, artists, parents, friends—who has inspired you to be in the world the way that you are?
I’m going to answer this in terms of who has inspired me specifically as a writer and scholar. Anyone, undergrad or grad, who’s taken a class with me for the last ten years can probably guess the primary answer: Toni Morrison. I started reading Morrison when I was in high school (so, antediluvian times). I read a lot of stuff back then, and as many Black writers as I could find (which weren’t many, and definitely weren’t canonical, because no Black writers were in my schools’ curriculums and not many were in the mall Waldenbooks, either). I remember reading Song of Solomon and not understanding almost anything. But I could feel enough of it to be haunted by the images the novel made me imagine, and I recognized the beauty of the writing. By the time I was in law school and read Beloved (as soon as it came out), I had a better understanding of Morrison and what she was doing with her fiction. What I learned first in studying Morrison, which made a big impact on me as a thinker and scholar—this is apart from osmotically absorbing her writing style and unconsciously imitating it in my early fiction, which was a real thing I didn’t realize had happened until much later—was to be unflinching and probingly curious no matter how terrible or uncomfortable or outraging whatever you looked at was. Morrison’s willingness to delve into fictive scenarios not only plowed right over taboos against “airing dirty laundry”—which people pilloried the likes of Alice Walker for—but thought deeply in the writing of the fiction itself about the why and how of intimate violence (parents murdering or violating children they love, for example, lovers killing their loved ones), the psychological and physical violence of racism of trauma, the pain of loss and fear of death: her straight-on, but always sensitive and sympathetic, consideration of all that was the model for the thinking in my first book, Extravagant Abjection.
I’ve realized just recently how I also osmotically learned from Sylvia Wynter. In fact, in the time between reading Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Beloved, I took my first class in Afro-American Studies during my undergrad senior year, and my teacher was Prof. Wynter. I’m sure that by the time I read Beloved and it made much more sense than Song, it was because Wynter had given me a powerful, brilliant deep-water immersion not only in parts of the Af Am literary canon, but in Black Caribbean thought (and non-Black! we had to read V.S. Naipaul, even though Sylvia said, “He does not like the Black, but we must read him to understand the context”), a history of the Harlem Renaissance, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, etc. I loved loved loved that class. I was astonished that it had taken me almost to the end of my undergrad experience to encounter Black thought and writing in the way that she offered it, and to learn that simple thing, Yeah, just because you’re Black doesn’t mean you know Black Studies. I used to sit in the front row and furiously scribble notes trying to keep up with her cosmos-spanning lectures that ranged up and down the lines of history from the assigned texts we were reading to places you didn’t expect to go. I didn’t know what her “method” was, and so far as I can remember, she didn’t discuss it, but I grasped the result: that in attempting to answer any questions, intellectual, political, or artistic in Black Studies, you read widely, from literary texts to philosophy to anthropology to evolutionary biology to precolonial African history to ancient and early modern Mediterranean history to sociology, and beyond. I took another class with her as a grad student before she retired, on Caribbean literature and history. After that, I didn’t really read Wynter from the early 90s onward. Then I started to see all these references pop up to her work about ten or fifteen years ago, especially among grad students. This semester Nadia Ellis from English and I are co-teaching a grad seminar, and she assigned a 2015 essay of Wynter’s that I wasn’t familiar with (even from grad student citations of Wynter), “The Ceremony Found. ” I 1) realized how much the way Wynter thinks and taught influenced and shaped the approaches to Black Studies I came to, and 2) I read a paragraph in the essay that essentially glossed the primary point of an article I just published in South Atlantic Quarterly. So I’ve realized, late in the game, that Wynter almost as much as, or as much as, Morrison, has been my guiding light.
Where do you come from? Is there a place that feels like home?
As the child of a military officer, I moved around a lot growing up. So I can never answer this question other than to say I that I don’t feel I’m from any one place in particular, or even any one region or country. Both my parents grew up in north Louisiana and Mississippi, so that’s where my extended family is based. I spent my first five years in the South (the then-just-barely-desegregating South), but my memories don’t really start until we arrived in (then-West) Germany just before turning six. I don’t feel like I’m from where my family is from. My family ended up spending six years in Germany, another three in North Carolina, two in Kansas, one in Kentucky. Since college I’ve mostly been in northern California (with a five-year interruption in DC and Connecticut), so here’s definitely where I’ve spent the longest amount of time. California doesn’t feel like where I’m from, though. There are a lot of things about it that give me a sense of northern Cal as home, apart from the accumulation of memories: the landscape once you cross the Golden Gate Bridge; the cool Pacific breeze. But there are things about Germany that ping a distant feeling of home-likeness, too (not that the Germans I interacted with ever let me feel comfortable enough there to fool myself that Germany was my home): the sound of the language being spoken; the way the landscape looks in southern Germany. Home for me is many places, but never really comfortably so. There are benefits to moving around and seeing other places and other ways to be in the world. There are prices to pay, too, and the feeling of a settled home is one of the things you don’t get, and never get, in my experience—so far.
What is your working, thinking, or making process?
Various. My creation arena—so far—is text-creation. But I find that how I end up writing anything (other than when I’m asked to), scholarship or fiction, is mostly mysterious. I remember reading an interview with Samuel R. Delany, where he said that reading and writing are both part of the same process. That seems true for me. I’ve always read a lot, and always wrote, even as a little kid. The way I remember Delany describing it—I can’t find the reference right now, so whatever he said, I absorbed it this particular way, which may be a misquote—is that you read and you read, and at some point you’re writing. And then the reverse.
Do you have an alternate-universe life in which you spend your time doing something totally different from this life? What do you do? Why?
I used to want to act. Even in grad school, I thought that if I really had my druthers, and I could risk the uncertainty of it, I would probably be acting. I always enjoyed my experiences doing theater, both in college and high school. There was nothing about it I didn’t like, but of course that was acting and theater in school, not in the world of commerce, where every working actor I’ve ever known can tell terrifying stories of humiliation and rejection. Later I realized that I thought acting was kind of a way to hide who I am while being elegant and praised, or to give people the part of myself I knew they would like. Now I know that real acting is showing the audience a part of your heart, in raw unvarnished form, every time—which I was in no way strong enough to do. So, this would have to be a really, really alternate universe 1) where I would have such blazing self-confidence—or such fearless willingness to be publicly vulnerable—that I could really work as that kind of artist-technician of the self that acting is, and 2) where I wouldn’t be typecast and could run the gamut of roles. Not this universe on either front.