The Carter G. Woodson Institute
The Carter G. Woodson Institute
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Alisha Gaines

Associate Professor (AAS)

Alisha Gaines is Associate Professor of African American and African Studies at the Carter G. Woodson Institute. Gaines has a PhD in English and a certificate in African and African American Studies from Duke University. From 2009-2011 she held a Carter G. Woodson Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Virginia. Before returning to UVA, Gaines was the Timothy Gannon Associate Professor of English and Affiliate Faculty in African American Studies at Florida State University.

Her first manuscript, Black for a Day: Fantasies of Race and Empathy, was published with UNC Press (Spring 2017). The project rethinks the political consequences of empathy by examining mid-to-late twentieth and twenty-first century narratives of racial impersonation enabled by the spurious alibi of racial reconciliation. Black for a Day constructs a genealogy of white liberals who temporarily "become" Black under the alibi of racial empathy. Its genealogy includes: the magical racial change of a white Senator in the 1947 musical, Finian's Rainbow; journalist Ray Sprigle's four weeks as a Black man in the South in 1948; journalist and memoirist, John Howard Griffin's, five weeks as a Black man in 1959; Grace Halsell's stunt as a Black woman in Harlem and Mississippi in 1969; and the families of the Sparks and the Wurgels switching races for reality television’s Black.White. in 2006. The project's epilogue then turns to the cultural nerve struck by the viral media story of Rachel Dolezal, a former NAACP chapter president who was "outed" for claiming she was Black.

A student of Black Souths, Gaines is currently writing her second manuscript, "Children of the Plantationocene," on Black American origin stories, Black craftscapes, and what we collectively inherit from the plantation. The work was born on Evergreen Plantation in Edgard, Louisiana, after an invitation to consult on an archaeological survey of its quarters in 2021. What was initially conceived as a two week stay blossomed into residential summers staying on Evergreen while planning and co-founding the Evergreen Plantation Archaeological Field School (EPAFS), an interdisciplinary, intercollegiate summer program for which Gaines serves as Co-Humanities Director.

An award-winning educator, Gaines’s interdisciplinary teaching interests include African American literature and culture, Black Study, Black Southern studies, Black queer theory, media and performance studies, and narratives of passing.

Select Publications

  • “andbutmaybe: Black Apocryphal Methodology in the Plantationocene.” (Accepted in a Special Issue on “Weird Geographies.” Cultural Politics, Duke University Press)
  • “Passing for Tan: Snooki and the Grotesque Reality of Ethnicity” in the edited collection, Neo-passing: Performing Identity after Jim Crow. University of Illinois Press, 2018.
  • Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.
  • "'A Secondhand Kind of Terror': Grace Halsell, Kathryn Stockett, and the Ironies of Empathy," in From Uncle Tom's Cabin to The Help: Critical Perspectives on White-Authored Narratives of Black Life. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Select Public Scholarship