Biography
Carol Bunch Davis is an Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University at Galveston and an Assistant Department Head in the Department of Liberal Studies. Her book Prefiguring Postblackness: Cultural Memory, Drama and the African American Freedom Struggle of the 1960s was published in paperback in January 2018. Dr. Davis recently presented her research on Galveston’s African American lifeguards “Building a Black Sense of Place: Galveston’s African American Beaches 1920-1962.” She is currently at work on a book manuscript about race and Galveston’s commemorative landscape.
Research
North of Broadway: African American Galvestonians and Galveston’s Beaches collects African American Galvestonians’ oral histories to document their experiences at the city’s segregated public beaches. African American Galvestonians’ beach experiences at segregated public beaches available at 29th and 103rd Street offered opportunities for leisure and recreational activities that were crucial to how the black community in Galveston crafted a black sense of place. These activities helped to construct both material and imaginative respite from restrictive social codes, laws and ordinances that sought to stifle and contain multiple modes of African American expressive cultural expression including recreation and leisure activities. In a city steeped in a rich African American history that is too often omitted from Galveston’s prevailing historical and commemorative narrative, North of Broadway looks toward complicating discourses of race and place in the Gulf South broadly and Galveston specifically, as well as to both narrate and theorize the beach’s centrality to Galveston’s black geography
