Arlin Hill
When Arlin Hill worked as a marketing consultant for Universal Music Group a few years ago, he got to see the vast influence that various record companies have on society.
That, coupled with courses he took as a graduate student at USC, is one of the many things that got him thinking about the role that culture plays in shaping how people in a particular society see themselves and, ultimately, how they
behave.
“When we start to accept certain things, how does that coalesce in a certain set of behavioral patterns?” Hill says when explaining the focus of his research. “How do I behave now that I’ve accepted that I’m this?”
Such are the questions that Hill is exploring in his fourth year as a Ph.D. student in Africana studies at Brown University.
Hill’s mentors say he is poised to transform the way Black society views itself within a broader society with a legacy of racial oppression.
“Arlin is a brilliant thinker who is driven by care and love for Black people and a deep desire to see them thrive,” says Dr. Ainsley LeSure, the Richard and Edna Salomon Assistant Professor of Political Science and assistant professor of Africana studies at Brown University. LeSure is on Hill’s dissertation committee.
“His intellectual work and devotion are just as much in service of Black people as it is reflective of his personal intellectual curiosities,” LeSure says.
Hill, a native of Cleveland, Ohio, credits his educator parents with helping to shape his research trajectory. His mother currently serves as a dean of students at a community college in Ohio. His father works for an intervention program that serves academically struggling students who attend the public schools in Cleveland.
Hill says his work is inspired by thinkers of the Black Radical Tradition. A major influence is Sylvia Wynter, the Jamaican writer and cultural theorist. He says his aim is to “disrupt colonial assumptions embedded within Western thought through a practice working to transcend various disciplinary bounds.”
“My work explores the deep connections between systems, identities, and categories of power and capitalism — especially those tied to both race and gender,” Hill says. “My work also investigates how alternative modes of thinking, living, and acting remain critical to the various means by which resistance to these systems are met.”
Hill wants people to reflect not only on what they do, but the reasons why. That can include seemingly mundane customs and cultural norms, such as men feeling obligated to be the one walking closer to the curb when they are walking on the sidewalk alongside a woman. Or how a particular song that is targeted toward teenagers might influence their behavior.
Hill is also interested in using the perspectives of different scholars of radical Black thought to stimulate and inform deeper discussions about Black realities within the Western world.
For instance, LeSure says, Hill has expressed interest in what it would mean to put Cedric Robinson in conversation with Sylvia Wynter about Western power as expressed through systems, identities, concepts, and ways of knowing.
“How would this conversation illuminate the dynamic between materialism and the symbolic when it comes to Western thought, Blackness, and alternative ways of being to challenge Western modes of power,” LeSure says. “Arlin’s work is going to put different areas of Black studies that are rarely in direct conversation with each other in service of thinking about the symbolic and material world of race, capital and gender.
“I am very excited to see how he will approach these questions in his dissertation,” LeSure says.
Hill has already begun to facilitate such discussions in the public sphere at Brown University, organizing panels on topics such as race, capitalism, slavery and colonialism. One event celebrated the life of Walter Rodney and how his life can inform scholars of Africana studies’ vision for what’s possible in the 21st century.
Part of that work involves continually questioning how people within the Black diaspora communicate and relate within the social realities that have persisted throughout time.
Or, as Hill says: “How does this social reality continue to reproduce itself?”
