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…

When: April 27th, 2022 12:00pm-1:30pm Location: Zoom webinar, register here. Professors Kellie Carter Jackson and Lenora Warren will join moderator Michael J. Myers II for a conversation about the capacious role of violent black rebellion in authoring new (unfinished) stories and the attendant possibilities created therewith to imagine new modalities of being.   On Black Violence and Black Futures with Kellie Carter Jackson and Lenora Warren

Register on Eventbrite to attend! When: April 20th, 2022 5:00pm – 9:00pm Location: Critical Resistance @ 4400 Telegraph Ave, Oakland The Black Healing Portal (BHP) / Portal Negro de Sanación is an interdisciplinary, multidimensional performance and community offering that shatters coloniality. Curated and dreamed up by the miraculous Krudxs Cubensi, unapologetic life-giving game-changers. BHP is resiliencia transformativa, es una combinación espacio, tiempo en clave tropical. It is a collaboration that centers the lives and artistic work of Afro Caribbean and Latin American self-created transfeminist warriors. Queer afrodiasporiques en movimiento. Authenticity from radical self-representation. The Black Healing Portal will take participants, Goddess…

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…

Time: April 13th, 2022 12:00pm-1:30pm Location: Zoom webinar, register here. This roundtable will seek to address itself to “black life” through descriptions of its particulars—bringing together several scholars of black life with several objects that, in part, index that life. Ranging broadly across the expressive terrain of black art, poetry, and thought, this roundtable will present some small demonstration of the various ways we might address ourselves to the aliveness that lives in representations of life, without disregarding the wake of historical emergence that radiates from them.   Presented by BSC Dissertation Writing Fellow, Jared Robinson    Show Don’t Tell: Describing Life…

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…

On Monday February 28th, the Critical Conversations series will host an online poetry reading and conversation with two UC Berkeley alumni who had the privilege to study with June Jordan in the Poetry for the People Program: Samiya Bashir (Associate Professor of Creative Writing, Reed College) and Solmaz Sharif (Assistant Professor of English, Arizona State University). Professors Bashir and Sharif will read their work; share some of their favorite poems written by June Jordan; and then participate in a wide-ranging conversation about teaching, the P4P program, and Jordan’s pedagogical legacy moderated by UC Berkeley Associate Professor Chiyuma Elliott (African American Studies). This year’s Critical…