Fall 2009 Events
The Legacy of Lincoln: A Colloquium
Friday, October 2, 2009
53 Wall Street, Whitney Humanities Center
1:30 pm, followed by a reception at 6:00 pm
This colloquium on the legacies of Abraham Lincoln features two panel discussions with historians David W. Blight, David Bromwich, Stephen Skowronek, Caleb Smith, Steven Smith, and Michael Warner. The afternoon event is followed by a reception at 6:00 pm.
This event is co-sponsored by the Gilder Lerman Center and the Yale University Department of English.
"Dey Take Indian For Slave": Visions of Enslavement in Marcus Rediker's The Slave Ship and Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger
Monday, October 5
230 Prospect Street, Room 101
12:00 pm
While dramatically altering understandings of the American colonial experience, studies of slavery in the Americas often overlook the place of American Indians in the Atlantic World, and in this presentation Professor Ned Blackhawk examines the triangle trade within two prize-winning narratives of Atlantic slavery.
This lecture is part of the GLC Brown Bag Lunch Series. Bring your lunch and the GLC will provide drinks and dessert.
African American Studies at Yale: Reflections at 40
Tuesday, October 6
81 Wall Street, Gordon Parks 201
Lunch available at 11:45 am, Discussion begins at noon
Richard J. Powell, John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University and one of the first scholars to receive an advanced degree in African American Studies from Yale University. Later that day, Professor Powell will give a formal lecture and receive the Wilbur Cross Medal, the highest honor bestowed by Yale's graduate school upon its alums.
Master's Tea: Robin Kelley, Professor of History and American Studies, USC
Monday, October 12
Calhoun College
4:30 pm
Professor Kelley will be talking about his newest book Thelonius Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original. There will be a book signing immediately following the tea.
In the Falling Snow: An Evening with Caryl Phillips
Monday, October 12
Labyrinth Books, 290 York Street
Time TBA
Please join us for a celebration of the US publication of Caryl Phillip’s latest novel, In the Falling Snow. The novel captures issues of diasporicity, class, and race in the late modern world through the story of both a man - Keith - at a turning point in his life and of a society moving from one notion of itself to another. For more information on Phillips and his work, please visit his website.
Event co-sponsored by the Initiative on Race Gender and Globalization and Labyrinth Books
Keeping up a distinction of Colour: Gender, Race, and Identity in the British Caribbean and the Metropolis during the Eighteenth Century
Brooke Newman, Honorary Research Fellow, University of Aberdeen
Monday, October 12
34 Hillhouse Avenue, Luce Hall Room 103
12:00 pm
Brooke Newman explores how West Indian identities -- white, black, and mixed-race -- were defined and contested during the eighteenth century, both by West Indians themselves and by metropolitan Britons who imagined, critiqued, and caricatured the inhabitants of the sugar islands. More than anything else in these slave societies, Newman demonstrates, gender relations and racial mixture undermined white West Indian attempts at collective self-definition.
This lecture is part of the GLC Brown Bag Lunch Series. Bring your lunch and the GLC will provide drinks and dessert.
Conversation with Madison Moore on Beyoncé's album, I Am Sasha Fierce
Thursday, October 15
81 Wall Street, Room 201
11:45 - 1:15 pm
Lunch will be served
Madison Moore is currently a fourth-year graduate student in American Studies at Yale University and freelance pop culture columnist at Splicetoday.com. He is the recipient of the Beinecke Fellowship for Graduate Study and the Ford Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellowship. Research interests include modern and contemporary art, glamour studies, performance studies, black popular culture, luxury industries, street art and urbanism.
Sponsored by Endeavors: Perspectives on Black Life and Culture
Southerners on the Run: Emancipation, Desertion, and the Collapse of the Old South
Yael Sternhell, Gilder Lehrman Center Postdoctoral Fellow
Wednesday, October 21
230 Prospect Street, Room 101
12:00 pm
The Civil War thrust on the roads of the Confederacy multitudes of truants: slaves fleeing their masters, soldiers deserting the army, and refugees retreating in the face of enemy invasion. Flight was a rare common experience in the Confederate South, which cut across race, class, and gender lines. In this talk, Sternhell examines how runaways of all hues shaped the downfall of slavery and the rise of black freedom and how antebellum hierarchies were reconfigured through the physical act of motion.
This lecture is part of the GLC Brown Bag Lunch Series. Bring your lunch and the GLC will provide drinks and dessert.
John Brown, Slavery, and the Legacies of Revolutionary Violence in Our Own Time: A Conference Commemorating the 150th Anniversary of the Harpers Ferry Raid
October 29-31
See the GIlder Lehrman Center's website for more details on its 11th annual international conference.
New Directions in Caribbean Studies Inter-institutional Network Meeting
Thursday and Friday, November 5-6
David Scott, Keynote Address on Thursday at 4:30 pm, 10 Sachem Street, 105
New Directions in Caribbeans Studies aims to question the place of Caribbean Studies in the global present at the level of conception, trajectory, and the political. Working interdisciplinary across interpretive platforms in the humanities and social sciences, NEW DIRECTIONS IN CARIBBEAN STUDIES aims to come to grips with the relationship of Caribbean Studies to both modern and late modern social formations. Professor David Scott (Columbia University) will deliver the keynote for the event. Professor Scott is an internationally recognized scholar of Caribbean Studies. Since completing his last book, Conscripts of Modernity, he has oriented himself to the question of Third World sovereignty. Professor Scott also edits the academic journal Small Axe. Please note that only the keynote event will be open to the public.
New Directions in Caribbean Studies Inter-institutional Network
* Hazel Carby, Department of African American Studies and American Studies, Yale University
* Kamari Clarke, Department of Anthropology, Yale University
* Aisha Khan, Department of Anthropology, New York University
* Wayne Modest, University of London
* Caryl Phillips, Department of English, Yale University
* David Scott, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University
* Deborah Thomas, Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
Co-sponsored by the IRGG, the Center for Transnational Cultural Analysis, the Departments of African American Studies and Anthropology, and the Dorothy Clarke Kemf Memorial Fund
Film Screening: We Aren't Dead Anymore/Nous ne sommes plus morts (part one)
Wednesday, November 11
Whitney Humanities Center Auditorium, 53 Wall Street
8:00 pm
Cameroonian filmmaker François Woukoache will introduce and screen his film about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
Conversation with Leon Wainwright, Manchester Metropolitan University
Thursday, November 12
81 Wall Street, Gordon Parks Room 201
11:45 am - 1:15 pm lunch will be served
Dr. Wainwright will discuss his forthcoming projects, including monographs relating to an assembled community of black artists in contemporary Britain, and British and Caribbean relations in the visual arts.
Sponsored by Endeavors: Perspectives on Black Life and Culture
Blonde Roots: An Evening with Bernadine Evaristo, Moderated by Caryl Phillips
Monday, November 16
Labyrinth Books, 290 York Street
5:30 pm
Please join us for a discussion and celebration of the publication of Bernadine Evaristo’s latest novel Blonde Roots. The novel explores many social, ethical, and historical issues: the most controversial of all being the reversal of the transatlantic slave trade. The novel concerns itself what it means for Africans to assume the role of mastery over Europeans. Please visit her website for further information. Caryl Phillips, Professor of English at Yale University, will moderate the discussion and serve as interlocutor.
This event co-sponsored by Labyrinth Books.
Spoken Word Performance and Reading: Because when God is too Busy: Haiti, me, and THE WORLD
Gina Athena Ulysse, Wesleyan University
Wednesday, November 18
10 Sachem Street, Room 105
6:00 - 8:00 pm
How did Haiti--the enfant terrible of the Americas become the béte noire of the region? In her dramatic monologue Gina Athena Ulysse uses history, ethnography, and song to consider how the past occupies the present. She weaves spokenword with Vodou chants to reflect on her childhood memories, social (in)justice, spirituality, and the incessant dehumanization of Haitians. Ultimately, she offers critical musings on geopolitics from the perspective of a Haitian-American woman who is bent on loving Haiti, loving Vodou and herself despite the odds.
Sponsored by Endeavors: Perspectives on Black Life and Culture
A Conversation Between Natasha Trethewey and Elizabeth Alexander
Thursday, December 3
81 Wall Street, Gordon Parks Room 201
12:00 - 1:00 pm, lunch will be served at 11:45 am
NATASHA TRETHEWEY is the 2009 James Weldon Johnson Fellow in African American Studies at the Beinecke Library; she is the author of Domestic Work (selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet), Bellocq’s Ophelia, and Native Guard, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She has received awards and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. She is Professor of English at Emory University, where she holds the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry.
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER is Professor of African American Studies and Chair of the African American Studies Department. In 2008, Dr. Alexander was selected by President Barack Obama to compose and read a poem for his inauguration on January 20. She is the author of four books of poems, The Venus Hottentot (1990), Body of Life (1996), Antebellum Dream Book (2001), and American Sublime (2005), which was one of the American Library Association’s 25 Notable Books of the Year as well as one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Her collection of essays on African American literature, painting, and popular culture, The Black Interior, was published in 2004. Her verse play, “Diva Studies,” was produced at the Yale School of Drama in May 1996. Alexander has taught at the University of Chicago, where she won the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, New York University’s Graduate Creative Writing Program, and Smith College, where she was Grace Hazard Conkling Poet–in–Residence, first director of the Poetry Center, and member of the founding editorial collective for the feminist journal Meridians. She teaches courses on African American poetry, drama, and 20th century literature, as well as the survey introduction to African American Studies.
Sponsored by Endeavors: Perspectives on Black Life and Culture
Thomas Glave and Hazel Carby
The Torturer's Wife
Monday, December 7th
Labyrinth Books, 290 York Street
5:30 PM
Thomas Glave will be reading from his recent collection of short stories. Hazel Carby will introduce the author and lead off the discussion.
Glave is known for his stylistic brio and courageous explorations into the heavily mined territories of race and sexuality. Here he expands and deepens his lyrical experimentation in stories that focus -- explicitly and allegorically -- on the horrors of dictatorships, war, anti-gay violence, the weight of traumatized memory, secret fetishes, erotic longing, desire, and intimacy.
THOMAS GLAVE is an O.Henry award-winning author and was named a Village Voice Writer on the Verge in 2001. His previous books are Whose Song? and Words to Now: Imagination and Dissent. He is the editor of Our Carribean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles. He is the 2008-2009 Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Professor in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at MIT.
Spring 2010 Events
Kobena Mercer
Allegories and Emblems: Hew Locke's Post-Colonial Baroque
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Loria Center, 190 York Street, Room 250
5:30 pm
In sculptural assemblages built up from kitsch materials, the British-Guyanese artist Hew Locke reveals the perverse afterlife of European aesthetic categories that have been contaminated by cross-culturality. Drawing on Walter Benjamin's conception of allegory, this lecture explores the logic of transculturation in Locke's practice and teases out its implications for post-colonial and diasporic studies in art history.
Co-sponsored by the History of Art Department.
A Conversation with Farai Chideya, A Poynter Fellowship in Journalism Lecture
Be the Media You Want to See: How Social Media and Citizen Journalism Are Changing the World
Monday, February 1, 2010
Whitney Humanities Center, Room 208
4 pm, Limited seating; first come, first seated.
For more information click here.
Farai Chideya is a journalist with NPR, Newsweek, MTV News, CNN, ABC News.
Co-sponsored by the History of Art Department.
Ana Lara
Reading followed by discussion and reception
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
PhD candidate in African American Studies and Anthropology
81 Wall Street, Gordon Parks Room, Room 201
5:30 - 7:00 pm
Ana-Maurine Lara's poetry and short fiction has appeared in several literary journals including Blithe House Quarterly, The Encyclopedia Project, Sable LitMag and Torch Magazine. She has received awards from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Puffin Foundation, the Brooklyn Arts Council and PEN Northwest. Her debut novel, Erzulie's Skirt, was selected as a Lambda Literary finalist in 2006; her second (unpublished) novel, Anacaona's Daughter, won Third Place Prize in the National Latino/Chicano Literary Prizes.
Ana-Maurine is a Cave Canem Fellow and an alumna artist of The Austin Project Experiments in the Jazz Aesthetic. She has coordinated an oral history project documenting the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender artists titled: We are the Magicians, the Path Breakers and the Dream Makers and is also co-author of bustingbinaries.com: a website dedicated to addressing binary thinking in U.S.-based social justice movements. For more about Ana-Maurine Lara and her work, visit her website.
While the event is free, the evening is dedicated in solidarity with HAITI, with contributions accepted at the door for ASTRAEA FOUNDATION'S HAITI FUNDS, which will go to artists and activists in Jacmel.
Beinecke Tour and Discussion led by Louise Bernard
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Beinecke Library, 121 Wall Street, Room 39
11:45 am - 1:15 pm, lunch will follow the tour and discussion
Dr. Bernard, curator of the new exhibit, "Elements of Style: Fashion and Form at the Beinecke," will discuss the newly acquired material and lead a short tour of the exhibition. For more on the exhibition, visit the Beinecke events calendar.
Calhoun College Black History Month Dinner
Ryan Stewart
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Calhoun College, 189 Elm Street
Ryan Stewart, former NFL athlete and major sports radio show personality in Atlanta, is the guest speaker at this year's annual Black History Month Dinner.
A Conversation with Didier William
Thursday, February 11, 2010
William L. Harkness Hall, 100 Wall Street, 211
11:45 am - 1:15 pm
Part of the ENDEAVORS: Perspectives on Black Life and Culture Series
Emily Greenwood, Associate Professor of Classics, Yale University
Re-Rooting Classics: Liberation Philology in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry
Thursday, February 18, 2010
William L. Harkness Hall, 100 Wall Street, 211
11:30 am - 1:15 pm
Part of the ENDEAVORS: Perspectives on Black Life and Culture Series
Sumanth Gopinath, Assistant Professor of Music Theory, University of Minnesota
Trajectories of the Political Ringtone: Hugo Chavez and the Referendum of 2007
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Location to be announced
4:30 pm
The political ringtone, which in the form of national anthems and ethno-religious songs dates back to the earliest days of customizable ringtones, was profoundly transformed by the ringtone's mutation into a sound file. Recasting the cellular telephone as a portable music/sound playback and even recording device, the newest incarnation of the political ringtone has given rise to what might be understood as a global form: the political voice-remix ringtone. Originating in the Philippines in the summer of 2005 with the election scandal involving President Gloria Arroyo, in which the president's voice was wiretapped while in conversation with an election official, successive attempts to utilize ringtones in this fashion began to appear in various parts of the world. One particularly important example was that of the "¿Por que no te callas?" phenomenon, whose source was the previous mentioned phrase (English: "Why don't you shut up?") uttered by King Juan Carlos I of Spain to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez at the Ibero-American Summit in November 2007. The incident immediately attracted widespread attention, both in the Spanish-language press and as a mass-cultural new-media phenomenon—via YouTube and through ringtone remixes. Generating significant profits and amplifying fantasies of imperial nostalgia within Spain itself, the phrase and ringtone were quickly adopted by the white creole elite youth in Venezuela, who constitute a core component of the Chavez administration's opposition and played a significant role in the defeat of the proposed reforms in the December 2007 referendum.
Nikki Giovanni, Reading and Book-signing
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Yale Law School Auditorium, Sterling Law Building 127 Wall Street
5:30 pm
The Charles Davis Lecture (in celebration of 40th Anniversaries for the Afro-American Cultural Center, African American Studies, and Co-education at Yale) presents a reading and book-signing with Nikki Giovanni. The "Priestess of Black Poetry," Nikki Giovanni is a world-renowned poet, powerful literary voice, activist, and educator. Over the past forty years, her outspokenness, in her writing and in lectures, has brought the eyes of the world upon her. One of the most widely-read American poets, author of 30 books, and Grammy nominee, she prides herself on being "a Black American, a daughter, a mother, and a professor of English."
Co-sponsored by the Afro-American Cultural Center, Calhoun College, and the Department of African American Studies.
George Hoagland
Thursday, February 25, 2010
William L. Harkness Hall, 100 Wall Street, 211
11:45 am - 1:15 pm
Part of the ENDEAVORS: Perspectives on Black Life and Culture Series
Noel Anderson - MFA Thesis Opening
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Yale University School of Art, 1156 Chapel Street - First Floor Gallery
6:00 pm - 9:00 pm, refreshments will be served
Please join us for a performance by Noel Anderson during his MFA Thesis Opening.
Noel Anderson is a candidate for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture at the Yale School of Art. Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, Noel graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Prior to attending the Yale School of Art, Noel earned a Master of Fine Arts in Printmaking from Indiana University.
Part of the ENDEAVORS: Perspectives on Black Life and Culture Series
Rob Nixon, Rachel Carson Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Slow Violence, Neoliberalism and the Environmental Picaresque
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
63 High St, Linsly-Chittenden Hall, Room 211
4:30 pm
This talk engages the relative invisibility of slow violence, that is, calamities whose fatal repercussions are neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but dispersed across space and postponed across time. In addressing the conjoined ecological and human disposability that has characterized the neo-liberal era, Nixon examines the way writers have repurposed the figure of the picaro to breathe imaginative life into both the dynamics of slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor.
Professor Nixon is the author of London Calling. V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin (Oxford); Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood. South African Culture and the World Beyond (Routledge); and Dreambirds: the Natural History of a Fantasy (Picador). His book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor is forthcoming from Harvard University Press.
Professor Nixon is a frequent contributor to the New York Times. His writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Chronicle of Higher Education, Critical Inquiry, South Atlantic Quarterly and elsewhere.
Discussion with Robert Perkinson, Associate Professor of American Studies, University of Hawaii at Manoa
Author of Texas Tough: The Rise of a Prison Empire
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Hall of Graduate Studies, 320 York Street, Room 204
12:45 pm Lunch will be served
This event is co-sponsored by Endeavors: Perspectives on Black Life and Culture and Y'All University, the History Department's Southern History Working Group
Shahrzad Mojab, Professor of Adult Education and Counseling, University of Toronto
Tracing Dollars, Mapping Colonial Feminism: America Funds Women's 'Democracy' Training in Iraq
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
63 High St, Linsly-Chittenden Hall, Room 211
4:30 pm
Following the 2003 occupation of Iraq, the United States launched a comprehensive ‘democracy’ training program, targeting women in particular. This was part of the project of ‘regime change’ and the implanting of a pro-American polity and civil society. My research, along with the emerging literature on the practices of NGOs in ‘post-war reconstruction’, paints a complex picture of the relationship between imperialism, capitalism, colonialism and feminism. This paper will argue that the existing body of literature on women’s NGOs and education does not identify the encroachment of international organizations and state actors through various training activities as a manifestation of the convergence of imperialism and colonial feminism. The empirical evidence for this paper is based on extensive fieldwork in the Kurdish region of Northern Iraq in 2005 as well as a survey of the existing critical feminist literature on women’s NGOs, war, militarization, ‘post-war’ reconstruction and women’s learning. In this paper, I will follow the ideology, policy, and practices of gender-based funding packages; a process that I have called ‘tracing dollars.’ My objective is to map out in detail the actual mechanisms through which ‘colonial feminist’ dependency is being created under the condition of imperialism and occupation. To achieve this, I will provide a detailed mapping of major US-based donors to women=s NGOs in the Kurdish region of Iraq. This paper is a study of the changing landscape of feminist and women’s movements under conditions of convergence between imperialism and nationalism and their project for the control of a new political force in the Middle East, that is, women. It documents and critiques the ways in which anti-feminism and colonial feminism bind the US imperialist project and Iraqi and Kurdish nationalist politics.
The House that Etheridge Built
Reginald Dwayne Betts
Randall Horton
Marcus Jackson
John Murillo
Thursday, April 22, 2010
The Afro-American Cultural Center, 211 Park Street
7:00 pm
Etheridge Knight often said it is “a valid ambition to want the words you strung together to live on the lips of ordinary people.” Today, four emerging African-American poets echo that sentiment with each line they write. Reginald Dwayne Betts, Randall Horton, Marcus Jackson and John Murillo have come together to form the Symphony. These four poets combine their voices into four movements that form one song: a multitudinous story of love, prison, fatherhood and the denizens of cities often absent from American verse. The House that Etheridge Built is part lecture, and part poetic suite. It is an introduction to the work of Etheridge Knight and an introduction to the voices of his literary descendants, all who aim to have their words live on the lips of ordinary people.
