The Black Room @ UC Berkeley
November 2, 2015
The Black Room: Revisiting "Blackness" In The Global 21st Century
Program Series: Interdisciplinary Faculty Programs
The Black Room: Revisiting “Blackness” in the Global 21st Century organized by Nadia Ellis (English), Leigh Raiford (African American Studies), Darieck Scott (African American Studies), and Bryan Wagner (English), deals with “The Black Room,” an inclusive space that exists to foster critical reflection and exchange about foundational terms and concepts in African American and African Diaspora Studies. This project will answer questions such as: What is blackness? Is it a culture, a politics, a standpoint, or a way of being? What does it mean to belong to the black diaspora? Is the meaning of blackness anchored in the history of slavery, or does it have other fundamental characteristics that need to be considered? What does it mean, moreover, to raise these questions about blackness at a moment when the political movements against slavery, colonization, and segregation are so frequently invoked as the paradigm or primary example for understanding other struggles for freedom and equality? The Black Room will invite scholars and artists to campus whose work engages with blackness not as a historical condition whose meaning is already known but instead as a problem for thought.
Liberating Dreams
October 19, 2015
Faculty, Ph.D. candidates win fellowships for humanities, social science research
August 6, 2015
Interview: On Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination
April 30, 2015
Check out this latest post on the African American Intellectual History Society's blog--an interview with Robeson Taj Frazier on his latest book, THE EAST IS BLACK: COLD WAR CHINA IN THE BLACK RADICAL IMAGINATION.
Dr. Frazier is a graduate alumni of the African Diaspora Studies program, and presently an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. His research explores black political culture and popular culture, globalization and cross-cultural traffic, and African diasporic intellectual history, with a specific focus on the intersections between African American culture and other cultures, especially 20th and 21st century China.
St. Clair Drake Research Symposiym – May 4, 2015
April 28, 2015
The Black Room presents…Kobena Mercer
April 18, 2015
The Black Room: Revisiting “Blackness” in the Global 21st Century presents…
“Afromodern versus Post-Black? A Diasporic Historiography for African American Art”
Kobena Mercer, Professor in History of Art and African American Studies at Yale University
Scholarship in African American art history has flourished between 2000 and 2015, yet this was also when “post-black” gained currency to suggest race no longer matters in culture and society. Arguing that “Afromodernism,” a term Robert Farris Thompson coined in 1991, offers a more flexible analytical tool for diaspora-based research, this paper argues that conceptual resources for such an undertaking are nothing new but have been waiting for us in the picture book Alain Locke published in 1940, The Negro in Art.
Kobena Mercer is a Professor in History of Art and African American Studies at Yale University. His teaching and research focusses on the visual arts of the black diaspora, examining African American, Caribbean, and Black British artists in modern and contemporary art, with a focus on cross-cultural aesthetics in transnational contexts where issues of race, sexuality, and identity converge.
His first book, Welcome to the Jungle (1994), introduced new lines of inquiry in art, photography, and film, and his work features in several interdisciplinary anthologies including Art and Its Histories (1998), The Visual Culture Reader (2001) and Theorizing Diaspora (2003). He initiated and edited the Annotating Art’s Histories series, published by MIT and INIVA, bringing a global perspective to modernist art history and the titles are Cosmopolitan Modernisms (2005), Discrepant Abstraction (2006), Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures (2007), and Exiles, Diasporas & Strangers (2008).
Professor Mercer is an inaugural recipient of the 2006 Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing awarded by the Sterling and Francise Clark Art Institute in Massachussetts. His next book, Travel & See: Black Diaspora Art Practices since the 1980s, is a collection of essays forthcoming from Duke University Press, and also published in 2014 is, “New Practices, New Identities: Hybridity and Globalization,” the closing chapter in The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume V, The Twentieth Century (Harvard University Press)
About The Sponsors:
The Black Room: Revisiting “Blackness” in the Global 21st Century
UC-Berkeley History of Art Department
The Institute of International Studies
Rickey Vincent discusses “Party Music” on April 27th
April 16, 2015
Please join the American Cultures Center as we host Dr. Rickey Vincent as he discusses his latest book, ‘Party Music: The Inside Story of the Black Panthers’ Band and How Black Power Transformed Soul Music.’
Chicago Review Press
Party Music is both social movement analysis and radical music history. Party Music tells the story of The Lumpen, the short lived R&B band comprised of rank-and-file members of the Black Panther Party in 1970. The interaction of soul music aesthetics and black power politics is illustrated vividly through first hand narratives of members of the group.
MoAD Lecture | Darieck B. Scott
April 12, 2015
LECTURE | Tell Me More: Scholarly Voices Across the African Diaspora with Dr. Darieck B. Scott
“Black (Super)Power Fantasies: Blade the Vampire Hunter and the Black Male Superhero Figure”
In this lecture, Dr. Darieck Scott will discuss the monstrous and the sexual dimensions of black male imagery in superhero comics, focusing on the character “Blade”—also the main character of a trio of Hollywood action movies starring Wesley Snipes. He will discuss how comic book male superheroes’ extreme hyper-masculinity becomes uncomfortably exaggerated when the superhero is a black male, a figure already over determined in Western cultures as an exemplar of extreme, out of control physicality.
Darieck Scott earned his Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University, and an M.A. in African American Studies and a J.D. from Yale. Before coming to UC Berkeley he taught in the English departments of the University of Texas at Austin, and UC Santa Barbara. His teaching and research interests include: 20th and 21st century African American literature; creative writing; queer theory, and LGBTQ studies; race, gender and sexuality in fantasy, science fiction, and comic books.
For more information visit MoAD website here.
Black Graduation 2015!
March 30, 2015
Black Graduation 2015 will take place on Saturday, May 23, 2015 at 2pm in Zellerbach Hall.
As always, Black Graduation is planned and hosted by the staff and faculty in the Department of African American Studies as the primary graduation ceremony for students earning undergraduate and graduate degrees in African American and African Diaspora Studies. While our first responsibility is to serve our majors, we are happy to open up the ceremony to students graduating from other programs as a service to the broader Cal community.
Change You CAN’T Believe In: How a Police Texting Scandal Echoes San Francisco’s Racist Past
March 30, 2015
San Francisco and its environs enjoy a longstanding reputation as a progressive haven within the US, a place associated with gay pride, school desegregation, freedom of speech, hippies, and, now, hipsters attempting to advance human potential and quality of life through technology. But as recent events in the city attest, there’s another San Francisco, one where only 6% of city residents (but 56% of the city’s jail population) are black; a San Francisco built on a legacy of decades of imported racism.
Berkeley Summer Sessions! : Intensive Elementary Swahili
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
Michelle Wright Lecture – March 19th @ 5 pm
February 26, 2015
Many Thousands Still Coming: Theorizing Black Diasporic Identities in a Moment of Agency, Diversity & Inclusion
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 Black African collectives across the Diaspora. At the same time, Black women, Black queers and Black communities and individuals who are not directly interpellated through an epistemology of the Middle Passage remain exceptions to the rule—despite the fact that they outnumber “traditional” Black diasporic identities.
In this talk, Michelle M. Wright argues that our use of “Newtonian” spacetime in Black Diaspora studies unintentionally creates this marginalization. By revealing how most ideations about time and space in physics are being refashioned and reformulated through contemporary conceptual explorations of Blackness in the academy, including afro-futurism and afro-pessimism, Wright maps out a “physics of Blackness” in which agency, diversity and inclusion are the norm rather the exception.
Michelle M. Wright is an associate professor of Black European and African Diaspora studies in the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She is the author of Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diasporaand, with Tina Campt, co-editor of Reading the Black German Experience, a special issue of Callaloo. This talk is based on her latest book, Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
Charlotte “Mama C” O’Neal – Feb. 25th, 2015
February 19, 2015
Charlotte “Mama C” O’Neal and the UAACC
United African Alliance Community Center Heal the Community Tour 2015
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 City, Kansas, but left the states at age 19 to live and work in Africa. She has lived in Tanzania since 1972. She is co-director of the United African Alliance Community Center (UAACC), which was founded by her husband Pete O’Neal and which provides classes in various subjects for the AruMeru Community outside of Arusha, Tanzania.
* Film directed and produced by Joanne Hershfield, Perennial Films, 2012.
Co-sponsors of the event: The Center for Race and Gender, African American Student Development Office, Student Learning Center, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies – Chau Hoi Shuen Foundation Fund
Black Insurgency and the Unconsicous: A Talk by Dr. Frank B. Wilderson, III
February 19, 2015
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.
Professor Ricky Vincent at Chabot College
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
MoAD – #BlackLivesMatter: Continuing the Civil Rights Movement
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.
Committed Cinema – Thomas Allen Harris @ BAM/PFA
February 10, 2015
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 photography in the United States, one that includes amateurs such as his grand- father, neighborhood studio photographers in black communities, and contem- porary black artists. An unknown, fascinating history of the representation of African Americans emerges, refuting the identity created by mass media images. In Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela, Harris uses imaginative re-creations to document his South African father’s life and the early days of the African National Congress. In both films, he draws on a diverse array of imagery and interviews to create visually striking and insightful film essays. As A. O. Scott noted in the New York Times, “he is a wise and passionate guide.”
We are delighted that Harris will present his work at the PFA Theater, where he will be joined by Leigh Raiford in conversation following the screening of Through a Lens Darkly. Raiford is the author of Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle and coeditor of The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory; she is an associate professor in African American Studies at UC Berkeley.
Kathy Geritz, Film Curator
TWELVE DISCIPLES OF NELSON MANDELA: A SON’S TRIBUTE TO UNSUNG HEROES
THOMAS ALLEN HARRIS (SOUTH AFRICA/US, 2005)
Written by Harris. Photographed by Jonathan Kovel, David Forbes. (73 mins, Color/B&W, DigiBeta, From the artist)
IN PERSON Thomas Allen Harris
“Something of a miracle.” TIME OUT
THROUGH A LENS DARKLY: BLACK PHOTOGRAPHERS AND THE EMERGENCE OF A PEOPLE
THOMAS ALLEN HARRIS (US, 2014)
Written by Harris, Don Perry, Paul Carter Harrison, inspired by the book Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present by Deborah Willis. Photographed by Martina Radwan. (92 mins, Color/B&W, DCP, From the artist)
IN CONVERSATION Thomas Allen Harris and Leigh Raiford (African American Studies)
New Book from Robeson Taj Frazier
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 struggles against imperialism and black American movements against social, racial, and economic injustice. In The East Is Black, Taj Frazier examines the ways in which these figures and the Chinese government embraced the idea of shared struggle against U.S. policies at home and abroad. He analyzes their diverse cultural output (newsletters, print journalism, radio broadcasts, political cartoons, lectures, and documentaries) to document how they imagined communist China’s role within a broader vision of a worldwide anticapitalist coalition against racism and imperialism.
Special Recognition for Alumni Marlon M. Bailey, PhD
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!