News & Events Archive: 2015

March 12, 2015

Coming this Summer: Intensive Elementary Swahili with Professor David Kyeu Summer Session C: June 22 - Aug 14 MTWTF 5 - 9 pm 54 Barrows Hall 8 Units For more information please contact: kyeu@berkeley.edu  

February 26, 2015

Many Thousands Still Coming: Theorizing Black Diasporic Identities in a Moment of Agency, Diversity & Inclusion Lecture: Date: March 19, 2015 Time: 5:00PM-6:30PM Location: 652 Barrows Book Signing and Reception Time: 7:00PM-8:00PM Location: University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way, Berkeley, CA 94704 ......... Twenty years ago Paul Gilroy’s landmark book The Black Atlantic encouraged scholars of the African and Black diasporas to imagine Blackness as a unified yet diverse unit, embracing difference even as it moved forward with a singular aim for agency and equality in the world.  Today we enjoy a proliferation of scholarly studies on a broad range of Black and…

February 19, 2015

Charlotte "Mama C" O’Neal and the UAACC United African Alliance Community Center Heal the Community Tour 2015 Wednesday, Feb. 25, 2015 | 2-4 pm Multicultural Community Center Hearst Field Annex - D37, UC Berkeley (Bancroft Way between Bowditch & Telegraph) Program: 2 pm Film Screening of Mama C: Urban Warrior in the African Bush* 3 pm Presentation & Q&A For more information: 510-642-6528 or mcc.community@berkeley.edu Wheelchair accessible. Please call ahead for special needs. Charlotte Hill O’Neal, aka Mama C, is a vocalist, writer, poet and visual artist who has been performing professionally for more than twenty years and exhibiting her art work extensively since 1986. Mama C was born in Kansas…

February 19, 2015

Black Insurgency and the Unconsicous: A Talk by Dr. Frank B. Wilderson, III Monday, February 23rd 5:30 - 8 pm UC Berkeley 102 Wurster Hall Cosponsored by The Cal Debate Team, The African American Studies Department, and the Center for Race and Gender. Frank's academic work has been on the cutting edge of recent debates in Critical Black Studies. His work draws heavily on black feminist scholarship from Saidiya Hartman and Hortense Spillers in thinking blackness, sexuality and gender and offers an expansive array of points of engaging and transformative dialogue. For more information visit: here, here and here. 

February 19, 2015

Professor Rickey Vincent will be at Chabot College in Hayward on Thursday, February 19th 6-8pm. He will discuss his book Party Music: The Inside Story of the Black Panthers Band and How Black Power Transformed Soul Music.  

February 19, 2015

On Friday, February 27th 6 - 9 pm, African American Studies graduate student Jarvis Givens will participate in a panel discussion on #BlackLivesMatter and the civil rights movement at MoAD in San Francisco. This is event is co-sponsored by the MoAD Vanguard and the SF Alphas. 

February 10, 2015

Committed Cinema Thomas Allen Harris Much of Thomas Allen Harris’s film work has involved looking into his personal history, which was shaped by the absence of his father, childhood years spent in Tanzania, his gay identity, and a grandfather interested in photography. While the emotional resonance of his films may reside in his family stories, Harris opens up the possibility of political action and social change by placing them within larger community contexts. His films boldly move from pain to celebration, from the personal to the epic. Harris’s most recent film, Through a Lens Darkly, constructs a counter history of…

January 28, 2015

Alumni Robeson Taj Frazier, PhD has just published his first book, entitlted: The East Is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination. He is an Assistant Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. Congratulations Taj! Description: During the Cold War, several prominent African American radical activist-intellectuals—including W.E.B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois, journalist William Worthy, Marxist feminist Vicki Garvin, and freedom fighters Mabel and Robert Williams—traveled and lived in China. There, they used a variety of media to express their solidarity with Chinese communism and to redefine the relationship between Asian…

January 23, 2015

UC Berkeley African American Studies and African Diaspora Studies Alumni Marlon M. Bailey, PhD has recently recieved a very special recognition. Professor Bailey's book, BUTCH QUEENS UP IN PUMPS: GENDER, PERFORMANCE, AND BALLROOM CULTURE IN DETROIT was awarded the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize from the GL/Q Caucus at the Modern Language Association (MLA). Congratulations Marlon!