Upcoming Events

Registration Link   Tickets will go on sale Tuesday April 19, 2022   Tickets will be available for purchase via tickets.berkeley.edu, by phone (510) 642-9988 and in person at Zellerbach Hall during regular business hours. They are open Tuesday-Friday, 12:00pm-5:30pm, Saturday-Sunday, 1:00pm-5:00pm.  The direct link for online purchase is  https://secure-tickets.berkeley.edu/18011/18012.   Students are encouraged to order online at tickets.berkeley.edu.  The phone lines and ticket window have been quite busy due to Cal Performances’ upcoming 2022-23 season announcement. But all ordering options (phone, online and in person) are available. Once tickets are purchased, they will be delivered by email only. Mail and will call delivery methods…

Wednesday, April 13th (6 – 8:30pm PT) Museum of African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco   bone black is a ritual performance reading for the late black feminist writer and theorist, bell hooks/Gloria Jean Watkins(1952-2021). The performance will feature 69 black women of all genders who will serve as live and virtual ritual readers reciting hooks’ prolific body of work. The ritual gathers artists, scholars, activists, workers, spiritual leaders, and everyday people to engage in this work and create collective spaces for grieving, reflection and ancestral veneration. The public is invited to bear witness – a concept/practice that hooks theorized extensively…

Archives hold the historical receipts that document and reveal the innovations, philosophies, and cultural dynamics of society. Without scholars, curators, intellectuals, and archivists like those serving on this panel, the power of Black lives and cultures would be pounded by the hammers of revisionism and relegated to obscurity. In a time of raging debates around “critical race theory” and book banning, collecting, documenting, and archiving Black lives and cultures across the diaspora remain an essential foundation for Afrofuturism. This powerful panel has been assembled to address some of the challenges and victories met related to how we preserve the voices…

On April 4th, the Critical Conversations series offers a creative follow-up to the fall semester Black Girlhood panel by featuring two poets whose work foregrounds Black childhood: Joshua Bennett (Dartmouth) and Chiyuma Elliott (UC Berkeley). Bennett and Elliott will read their work, share some of their favorite poems written by June Jordan, and then participate in a conversation about Black childhood in life and literature co-moderated by UC Berkeley Professor Nikki Jones and doctoral candidate reelaviolette bitts-ward (African American Studies). This event is in culmination of a year-long celebration of June Jordan’s life and legacy. Register      

Thursday, March 10, 2022. 1:00-2:30 pm PT Join UC Berkeley Professor Darieck Scott and colleagues from across the country for a virtual conversation about Scott’s new book, Keeping It Unreal: Comics and Black Queer Fantasy. Led by Ramzi Fawaz from University of Wisconsin, the panelists will explore the Black radical imagination, superhero comics, Black power and triumph, respite from white supremacy and much more. Speakers: Darieck Scott, Professor of African American Studies at UC Berkeley Ramzi Fawaz, Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison Rebecca Wanzo, Chair and Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis…

Register here   On March 7th, the Critical Conversations series welcomes Bay Area authors Tongo Eisen-Martin and Tanea Lunsford Lynx for a poetry reading and conversation about local geography, creative writing, and June Jordan’s artistic legacy. Eisen-Martin and Lunsford Lynx will read their work; share some of their favorite poems written by June Jordan; and then participate in a conversation about race, place, and belonging co-moderated by UC Berkeley Associate Professor Chiyuma Elliott and doctoral candidate John Mundell (African American Studies). The event is part of a year-long celebration of June Jordan’s work. This series continues to ask: what are…

The Performance of Labor/The Labor of Performance: A Convening           When: Feb 11th and 12th Where: Zellerbach Hall Mezzanine + African American Studies Reading Room The Performance of Labor/The Labor of Performance Talk Feb. 11th at 11am-12:30pm, Zellerbach Hall Mezzanine (in-person) and live streamed online via YouTube This event will take place Friday, February 11, from 11am–12:30pm in the Zellerbach Mezzanine Lobby on the UC Berkeley campus, and will be livestreamed simultaneously. Both in-person and virtual attendance are free and open to the public. Those who wish to attend in person are encouraged to review the COVID-19 safety policies and to register in…

Abdulrazak Gurna’s Nobel Prize in Literature: Implications in the African Language Classroom Abdulrazak Gurnah, Emeritus Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent, won the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature. The selection committee said the prize was “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.” Born and raised in Zanzibar, Swahili is his native language. His novels focus on East Africa, yet all are written in English. Three Swahili Language professors explore the implications of his work and Nobel Prize for…