October 30, 2009
Interview with Professor Cheryl Fish.
Visiting the Whitney Museum last year, BMCC English professor Cheryl Fish couldn’t help noticing that an exhibition of Buckminster Fuller’s work lacked any mention of his long-time collaborator, June Jordan.
A poet, essayist, educator and social activist, Jordan had worked closely with Fuller in the 1960s on “Skyrise for Harlem,” a conceptually daring architectural redesign of the neighborhood’s crumbling tenements. Renderings of the project were featured in the show, but only Fuller’s name appeared.
Correcting an historical omission
Fish brought the lapse to the attention of the curators and provided materials that documented Jordan’s role. Soon thereafter, her name appeared alongside Fuller’s on a descriptive placard. “I was happy to be able to make a difference in getting Jordan’s name in front of the public,” Fish says.
Now Fish has taken another step toward raising Jordan’s profile with the publication of an essay entitled “Place, Emotion and Environmental Justice in Harlem: June Jordan and Buckminster Fuller’s 1965 ‘Architextual’ Collaboration,” published in Discourse, Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture (Wayne State University).
“The fact is, few people know about Jordan or her collaboration with Fuller,” says Fish, whose English course often emphasize environmental justice issues in literature and film (she is also coordinator of BMCC’s intensive writing program). The Skyrise project “protested the dominant trend in urban renewal at the time, which was to kick people out of their homes in blighted inner cities and then rebuild ‘for the greater good.’”
Linking architecture and emotions
Instead, the Fuller-Jordan plan pictured 100-story apartment towers built over existing structures amidst ample greenery. “It was based on the belief that environment and housing—where people lived and how they felt about where they lived—could make a huge difference in their lives and their behavior.”
Jordan was deeply interested in the connection between space and emotion, Fish adds. “The Skyrise design incorporated a lot of her theories about this link,” she says. As Jordan saw it, if you live in a toxic and oppressive environment with no green space, breathing in toxic chemicals, how can you have hope?”
A few years ago, Fish, who often teaches Jordan’s poetry, came across a letter Jordan had written to Fuller, prompting her to learn more about her. Fish subsequently discovered a 1965 article Jordan had written for Esquire. Without Jordan’s knowledge, the piece was titled “Urban Slum Clearance,” reflecting the opposite of what she’d intended, and edited to emphasize Fuller’s contributions, while giving her own role short shrift.
“I often find that the roles of women—especially black women—are erased from history,” Fish says. “In large measure I wrote my article to set the record straight.”
Credit to publisher
This essay appeared recently in Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, a special issue on Race, Environment and Representation, edited by Mark B. Feldman and Hsuan l. Hsu.
