“Why not,” asked Dr. Latimer, “write a good, strong book which would be helpful to them? I think there is an amount of dormant talent among us, and a large field from which to gather materials for such a book.” Iola Leroy (1892), Frances E.W. Harper
Dear Iola, Love South LA is the annual LitLab production for the year 2020-2021. This year, Jacqueline Jean Barrios received a Teaching Innovation Grant from UCLA’s Excellence in Pedagogy and Innovative Classrooms (EPIC) program for her proposal entitled “18(92)/2020 Abolition Archives: Teaching Iola Leroy in South LA.” Together with co-PI’s from UCLA’s English department, Professors Richard Yarborough and Jonathan Grossman, and in partnership with UCLA’s Urban Humanities Initiative, the project imagines a South LA classroom as a historic site of recovery and production for narratives of resistance to racial violence and erasure. Through a study of the novel Iola Leroy, students will explore the ways urban space, specifically South Los Angeles, in the field to gather material that re-imagines Harper’s anti-racist book of the 19th century into the abolitionist books of the 21st.
Subscribe to our newsletter to receive announcements about this exciting new project!