Demetrius Eudell on O.J.

Fellow Demetrius Eudell makes a living looking at the big picture. The course he taught here at IU, entitled "From Romanus Pontifex to O.J. Simpson: Race, Discourse and the Origin of the Americas," focused on the influence race and racial issues have had on the development of western civilization. As he says, "the belief in Race formed a central part of the creation of the Americas, and therefore by extension, the modern world." By acquainting students with such wide-ranging material as the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, selections by Thomas Jefferson, W.E.B. Dubois and Franz Fanon as well as the most recent material concerning the O.J. Simpson trial, Eudell hoped to help students recognize the pervasive power of the idea of the black race as constitutive of the quintessential "Other." That distinction between black and white, he argues, has served and continues to serve as the very basis of American society as we know it, as is evident from the furor over the "Trial of the Century." "Black," he says, "is as ingrained a part of our culture as white; we don't have culture, culture has us." Eudell worked very hard to introduce students to such difficult and complex ideas by having them look at race in different historical contexts. He was greatly successful: "This was not an easy course, but I had some excellent students."

During his stay in Bloomington, Eudell was invited to present a paper at a Smithsonian Conference entitled "The Legacy of Slavery and of Abolition in the Caribbean." His paper, "The Mind of Emancipation," focused on the intellectual and political conceptions of emancipation and argued that emancipation was necessary for the formation of the nation/state and the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century. Emancipation, he argued, did not well serve the interests of black people, but rather those of industry and government.

Having just finished his Ph.D. in History from Stanford, and completed a two-year stint as a Thurgood Marshall Fellow at Dartmouth College, Eudell spent eight weeks in Bloomington before beginning his new job as Assistant Professor in the African American Studies Department at The Ohio State University.