May 1, 2025
Dear CU Boulder Community & Supporters of the CHA, It’s May Day – May 1. So many resonances with the date and the term "May Day." An International labor holiday. A celebration of spring. A call for help (mayday/m’aidez). In the times we are living in, perhaps all three are necessary. As a child, I remember making baskets out of construction paper and flowers out of tissue paper, then leaving them on my neighbors’ doorsteps.
It’s been a hard Spring semester – for reasons I likely don’t need to enumerate. I’ve had to engage in a lot of mindful breathing, which is a good reminder that when in doubt, slowing down and paying attention to my breath helps to put into perspective that the crises and emergencies around me won’t be solved by me or others immediately—that I need to breathe and figure out what I can do with my limited resources and power.
As director of the Center for Humanities & the Arts and a scholar who works in critical race theory and Asian American studies, I believe—ardently—that the arts and humanities give us tools to respond, cope, and engage with hard things. When we had our January book club to discuss Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message, we received so much feedback from people that they wished we could do it again. In the uncertainty of what was unfolding nationally, being together over a common reading gave people a sense of community and belonging.
Building on the overwhelmingly positive response from our Spring 2025 book club, we are excited to offer a Fall 2025 book club featuring Northwestern University creative writing professor Sarah Schulman’s The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity (Penguin Random House 2025)—here is an excerpt that describes Schulman’s book:
"For those who seek to combat injustice, solidarity with the oppressed is one of the highest ideals, yet it does not come without complication. In this searing yet uplifting book, award-winning writer and cultural critic Sarah Schulman delves into the intricate and often misunderstood concept of solidarity to provide a new vision for what it means to engage in this work—and why it matters."
The first 150 people to sign up on the CHA's Google form visit the CHA office can receive a free copy of the book. Pickups are available May 13 – June 13, Tuesdays – Fridays, 10am – 4pm at 201 Macky Auditorium. Walk-ins are welcome – we will collect your information onsite.
NOTE: Macky Auditorium should be open—the only door that opens is the one to the far left with the wheelchair placard. Please contact us at cu-cha@colorado.edu to let us know when you’ll pick up your book. If you can’t pick up the book between May 13-June 13, email us to request we hold a copy for you when our offices re-open in early August; book discussions will begin late August/early September.
This will be our last newsletter of 2024-25. There’s a lot of uncertainty in the world—and the same is true at the CHA. So let me end by giving flowers (in the colloquial/urban dictionary sense) to those who make the CHA a hub on campus for supporting arts and humanities and a bridge into the community: the amazing CHA staff, Diamond Darling and Adele Potter, along with our undergraduate student workers, Nyssa Baca and Devon Quispe—and the external and internal boards, particularly the faculty steering committee who read multiple applications from students and faculty in support of their arts and humanities projects. I receive a lot of accolades as the director, but I could not be a steward of the CHA without a team of people whose passion for arts and humanities inspires them and me to do the work of the CHA during these times of stress and duress. Thank you for reading this newsletter – thank you for being artists and humanists, whether by formal training or your passion for these subjects.
I don’t know how we will navigate the future, but I know that it’s going to involve a “we” – thank you for being part of that we.
Sincerely,
Jennifer Ho
Director, Center for Humanities & the Arts
PS. I just finished listening to the audio book of Michele Obama’s Becoming. It was soothing to listen to Obama reading her book, though it was also a bit heartbreaking to consider what she and her husband tried to accomplish during the 8 years they were in the White House and what that space is now. I also re-read Ross Gay’s Inciting Joy: Essays, the book that closed out the Critical Race Theory grad seminar I taught this Spring. I highly recommend it—because joy is resistance or as Gay writes, “And though attending to what we hate in common is too often all the rage (and it happens also to be very big business), noticing what we love in common, and studying that, might help us survive. It’s why I think of joy, which gets us to love, as being a practice of survival” (Gay 9-10).
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