North Carolina native Renée Alexander Craft is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a joint appointment in the Department of Communication and Curriculum in Global Studies. She earned a BA in English Literature and an MA in Communication Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University. She also serves as the Director of the Southern Oral History Program (SOHP) at UNC.
Broadly, Alexander Craft’s research and teaching examine the relationship among sociohistorical constructions of Blackness, Black cultural performance, and discourses of Black inclusion and exclusion within a hemispheric American framework. With an intersectional approach attentive to class, colorism, nationalism, nationality, language, gender, sexuality, history, religion, and region, her research reflects an interest in the following questions: How has Blackness come to mean what it does in discrete countries of the Americas? How have African descended communities used the power of creativity and imagination to build community, preserve culture, inspire collective action in the service of social justice, and call new futures into being by troubling the fault lines of structural domination?
For nearly twenty-five years, Alexander Craft’s research and creative projects have centered on an Afro-Latin community located in the small coastal town of Portobelo, Panama who call themselves and their carnival performance tradition “Congo.” She has completed both a manuscript and digital humanities project that reflect this focus. The first is an ethnographic monograph titled When the Devil Knocks: The Congo Tradition and the Politics of Blackness in 20th Century Panama, which was awarded the 2017 American Society of Theatre Research Errol Hill Award in recognition of outstanding scholarship in African American theatre, drama, and/or performance studies. The second project, titled Digital Portobelo: Art + Scholarship + Cultural Preservation (digitalportobelo.org), is an interactive online collection of ethnographic interviews, photos, videos, artwork, and archival material that illuminate the rich culture and history of Portobelo, Panama. Digital Portobelo was initiated through an inaugural 2013-2014 UNC Digital Innovations Lab/Institute for the Arts and Humanities Fellowship and supported by an inaugural 2016 Whiting Public Engagement Fellowship.
Alexander Craft’s current major research project is a multi-modal project examining a Portobelo, Panama-based artist cooperative and its impact on African American and Afro-Latin artists in the late 20th and early 21st century. Titled “Patacones, Paint Brushes, and Power: Historicizing an African Diaspora Arts Collective at the Crossroads of the Americas”(P3),” the project showcases and engages with artwork created by African American and Afro-Latin artists who participated in two significant artist retreats on the Caribbean coast of Panama between 1995 and 2015. The artists spotlighted in this exhibition were crucial participants in a cultural exchange that not only shaped their individual careers but also influenced the broader landscape of African Diaspora art. The project will culminate in an art exhibition, digital exhibition, edited manuscript, and podcast.
In addition to her research projects, Alexander Craft is a poet, novelist, and children’s book author. She received a 2013 Durham Arts Council Ella Pratt Emerging Artist Fellowship for I Will Love You Everywhere Always, a children’s book dedicated to helping children cope with death and loss.
Alexander Craft has also completed a women-centered transnational novel titled Patacones and Pepsi. This work of creative fiction was inspired by her experiences growing up in a Black funeral home family in North Carolina and twenty-five years of ethnographic research Panamá. The novel is complete at 124,000 words and is represented by Beth Marshea, Ladderbird Literary Agency.
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