Mandela’s work is our own
December 19, 2013
Mandela’s work is our own
by john powell
Bodies of Difference and Desire
December 5, 2013
Center for Race & Gender Thursday Forum Series presents...
Bodies of Difference and Desire
Meditations on Mammy: Asexuality and Blackness
Ianna Hawkins Owen, African Diaspora Studies
The Asexual Visibility and Education Network functions simultaneously as a message board based community and as an advocacy organization advancing the claim that asexuals are “just like everybody else.” In this context, black asexuals on AVEN have created threads/posts seeking out other black asexual users. Non-POC responses in these threads have employed various color-blind strategies that reveal the trouble the black asexual poses to the campaign of fusing “asexual” with “everybody else.” After nearly ten years of isolated posts/threads, a permanent thread was created to centralize posts by asexual people of color. In light of this newly institutionalized nexus of black and asexual, this paper meditates on the oft-cited asexuality of the historical figure of the Mammy and asks how thinking through her constructed image might become valuable to the project of finding the black asexual. This paper intends to engage issues of temporality, relations of power, and the ethics of “using” the Mammy. Moreover, if asexuality is a kind of failure of a normative mode of desiring, of reproductivity, and if blackness is almost universally hypersexualized, how do we situate the black asexual via our memory of the Mammy figure? Her body acts as a site that demands conversation between Lee Edelman's radical queer anti-futurity and Hortense Spillers' impossible black gender/sexuality, confronting the questions: is black always already sexual? Is a black asexual possible? What is generated by the woman (slave and enslaved to nostalgia) remembered as non-generative?
Spectacular Visualizations of Abjection: Critical Practices of Diaspora and Queer
Jasminder Kaur, African American Studies
In this paper I engage in a close reading of a digital high fashion advertisement to interrogate ‘black’ difference and dispossession. For many scholars of race, gender, sexuality, high fashion is a locked down toxic site, a space often unharnessed due to stereotypical representations. I, however, reposition it and open it up to innovative theoretical uses for the analysis of difference by deconstructing an image that deploys tropes of abjection, and that simultaneously celebrates a body of difference, to sell. My larger project interrogates the source of material dispossession of black subjects - abjection. Abjection is the condition of being despised, degraded, and expunged from society. I propose that, if one wants to understand black dispossession, one needs to engage with the role that abjection plays in the production of difference. Abjection is the narrative that justifies and sustains the notion of ‘black’ difference .I look at how the intersecting categories of difference (gender, race and sexuality) function to construct and exclude the ‘black’ subject from capital accumulation; from worth and value; from the realm of ethics, morals, beauty, and good; and ultimately from the realm of being ‘human’. In this paper by engaging in multiple interpretations of the same image, I demonstrate that at the same time that high fashion is a site of the production of categorical difference, that the space simultaneously disrupts these categories and as such may offer alternative possibilities. And as such I show what the space may offer for a study of abjection.
New Publication by Professor Stephen Small
November 22, 2013
Inaugural lecture delivered upon appointment to the chair of Extraordinary Professor
of History of the Dutch Slavery and its Legacy at the University of Amsterdam on
October 5th , 2012
Living History: The Legacy of Slavery in the Netherlands
A Conversation & Book Signing with HILL HARPER
October 31, 2013
Come out and meet a best selling author and award winning actor Hill Harper as he signs and talks about his latest book, Letters to an Incarcerated Brother. This powerful book has messages of inspiration and hope for us all. Come out, get your book signed, talk with the author and be a part of this historic Bay Area event!
brought to you by
UNITED MEN OF ALLEN TEMPLE
Black Girl ‘Geeks’ Want To See More Of Themselves In Comics
October 30, 2013
Comic book characters aren't exactly known for their racial diversity, but now a group of self-proclaimed black girl geeks are trying to change that. Guest Host Celeste Headlee speaks to Grace Gipson, a blogger for Black Girl Nerds, about the lack of black representation in geek culture.
Off the top of your head, how many black female comic book characters can you name?
Well, now a number of self-proclaimed black girl nerds who grew up reading comic books with characters that looked pretty much nothing like them are now joining forces to bring some diversity to so-called geek culture.
The below link is an interview hosted by NPR featuring Grace Gipson, a PhD student in African American Studies at UC Berkeley. She is also a contributing blogger for the site Black Girl Nerds, and she was recently featured in a piece for the Huffington Post called "Black, Female and Super Powered."
Why White People Are Called ‘Caucasian’ (Illustrated)
October 30, 2013
Nell Painter will present the Jefferson lecture on November 7, 2013, entitled: "Why White People Are Called 'Caucasian' (Illustrated)." The lecture is free and open to the public. No tickets are required.
About Nell Painter
Nell Painter is currently a painter (formerly known as the historian Nell Irvin Painter). She is the author of The History of White People and six other books and is the Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, at Princeton University. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies, among many others, she is a former president of the Organization of American Historians and the Southern Historical Association.
About the lecture
Nell Painter’s lecture will combine the discursive meanings of scholarship with the visual meaning of painting, to answer, literally, why white people are called 'Caucasian,' what that looks like, and how they all relate to our ideas about personal beauty.
Cynthia McLeod: The Cost of Sugar
October 30, 2013
In her presentation, UC Regents’ lecturer Cynthia McLeod takes us back to the 18th-century Caribbean plantation colony Suriname. She presents Surinamese society through the eyes of two Jewish sisters, Elza and Sarith, descendants of the settlers of the “New Jerusalem of the River,” known today as the Jodensavanne, the oldest Jewish settlement in Suriname which boasts the first synagogue in the Western hemisphere. The Cost of Sugar is a frank exposé of life in the Dutch slave colony when sugar ruled as kind – and the tragic toll it took on the lives of colonists and slaves alike.
Cynthia McLeod is a black Surinamese writer and activist. She is the daughter of the first democratically elected president of Suriname, Johan Ferrier. Her literary work is considered the main gateway to literature in Surinamese schools. As a former plantation colony, Suriname has a history that is deeply marked by slavery. Not surprisingly, then, slavery is the main topic in McLeod’s literary work. She not only focuses on the history of slavery but also shows how the social injustice that originated during the era of slavery continued to mark Surinamese society long after the abolition. McLeod is also a highly respected public intellectual who regularly appears in local media to discuss cultural and political issues.
Akinyele Omowale Umoja: “We Will Shoot Back”
October 29, 2013
In We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement, Akinyele Omowale Umoja argues that armed resistance was critical to the efficacy of the southern freedom struggle and the dismantling of segregation and Black disenfranchisement. Intimidation and fear were central to the system of oppression in Mississippi and most of the Deep South. To overcome the system of segregation, Black people had to overcome fear to present a significant challenge to White domination. Armed self-defense was a major tool of survival in allowing some Black southern communities to maintain their integrity and existence in the face of White supremacist terror. By 1965, armed resistance, particularly self-defense, was a significant factor in the challenge of the descendants of enslaved Africans to overturning fear and intimidation and developing different political and social relationships between Black and White Mississippians.
This riveting historical narrative relies upon oral history, archival material, and scholarly literature to reconstruct the use of armed resistance by Black activists and supporters in Mississippi to challenge racist terrorism, segregation, and fight for human rights and political empowerment from the early 1950s through the late 1970s.
Akinyele Umoja is a historian and organizer born from the Black Power movement and Black Studies tradition of the late 1960s and early 1970s. He is a scholar-activist, institution-builder, author, educator, community father, husband, parent, and grandfather. He has been active over forty years in the Black Liberation Struggle. Dr. Umoja was the first graduate student of the noted historian, Robin D.G. Kelley, and his writing has been featured in several scholarly publications including The Journal of Black Studies, New Political Science, The International Journal of Africana Studies, The Black Scholar, Radical History Review and Socialism and Democracy.
Analyzing police encounters with the public: Some methods for reducing the use of force
October 23, 2013
Geoffrey Raymond and Nikki Jones, Department of Sociology, UC Santa Barbara
Kristin Precoda, SRI International
Abstract:
This talk reports some initial findings from an ongoing, large-scale observational study of policing practices in two major cities. Using a large database of video recordings of police-civilian encounters (drawn from two sources, dash mounted cameras in patrol cars and video recordings made by researchers) and research methods that have enhanced the delivery of healthcare (by improving communication between doctors and patients, see Mangione-Smith, et al., 2004; Heritage, et al., 2010) this project has three main goals: (i) to understand and describe basic aspects of the real-time organization of police-civilian encounters and the interactional dynamics that give rise to the use of force in them; (ii) to find and describe communication practices that police officers can use to promote cooperatively organized encounters with civilians (and quantify how effective these practices are in reducing the use of force), and (iii) to contribute to the curriculum that state and county agencies use to train police officers. In this presentation we will discuss contemporary studies of policing (Bittner, 1972; Bayley and Garofalo,1989; Skolnick and Fyfe, 1993, Goodwin, 1994; Terril, 2003; Terril and Reisig, 2003), describe the research methods used in the current study (conversation analysis, ethnographic observation and quantitative methods) and analyze a collection of video recordings to illustrate some of the basic patterns our research has uncovered. One promising finding suggests that whether and how police officers respond to the queries and complaints that civilians pose in an encounter dramatically shapes how those encounters unfold, with some methods of responding making the odds of a cooperatively organized encounter (i.e., in which officers do not use force) twenty times greater.
Chiyuma Elliott—Langston Hughes and the Long Reach of the Blues Stanza
October 18, 2013
In the 1920s, Langston Hughes invented a new poetic form, the blues stanza, which enabled him to embody the continuing presence of the black countryside in the modern city. In his 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Hughes asserted the importance of creating a distinctively black poetics out of working-class life. The blues—and the blues stanza—were a central part of that project. Both Hughes’s blues poems and the form itself continue to be hugely influential in contemporary African American poetry and poetics. This talk explores that long reach—through a discussion of Natasha Trethewey’s hybrid blues poems, recent critical writing by Rowan Ricardo Phillips and Kevin Young, and the Bop (a new poetic form invented by Afaa Michael Weaver to update Hughes’s blues stanza for the 21st century).
30 Years Later
October 9, 2013
On October 19, 1983, the 4-year-old Grenadian revolution, the only Black revolution in the English speaking Western world, was effectively halted by an internal coup followed six days later by an American military invasion.The United Nations General Assembly condemned the invasion.
The ostensible reason for the incursion carried out under President Ronald Reagan, was to stabilize the country and save American students studying at an American offshore medical school in Grenada. The Reagan administration had been hostile to the revolution from its inception. Reagan’s expressed fear was that Cuba (helping Grenada build a new international airport) was erecting missile bases in Grenada and supporting a socialist government in the country.
In spite of Grenada’s best efforts to normalize relations between the two countries, the United States government refused to meet with leaders of Grenada’s People’s Revolutionary Government.
REMEMBERING AND REVISITING THE GRENADA REVOLUTION
Multimedia Presentation
Kathy Sloane, Free Lance Photographer
Kathy Sloane’s photographs are the only archive of images made in Grenada during its revolutionary period. The rest were destroyed during the American invasion. She worked in Grenada for UNICEF, and under the People’s Revolutionary Government for the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, Agriculture and The Department of Tourism in 1982 and 1983.
Panel Discussion Moderated by Dr. Hardy Frye
Laurie Lambert, Assistant Professor African American and African Studies
University of California at Davis
Lambert is a native of Grenada. Her recent dissertation, Worlds Real and Invented: The Grenada Revolution and the Caribbean Literary Imaginary , traces the transnational scope of the Grenada Revolution, analyzing the ways in which literature and techniques of narration are used to amplify and concretize the impact of small island political culture on the entire Caribbean and African Diaspora.
Eugene “Gus” Newport, Mayor of Berkeley 1979-1986
Long time activist and currently national consultant in Community Development.
Under Newport, Berkeley hosted Grenadian PRG Government ministers in Berkeley in 1982 and 1983.
In 1990, The Grenada Foundation sent him to Grenada as part of a delegation to observe the elections.
Don Rojas, Communications Director, The Praxis Project
During the Revolution (1979-1983) Rojas was press secretary to Prime Minister of Grenada, Maurice Bishop. In the ensuing 30 years he has served as the first Communications Director of the NAACP, Media Manager for Oxfam America, Executive Editor of the New York Amsterdam News and General Manager of the Pacifica Radio station WBAI.
Sponsored by African American Studies Department.and Dr. Hardy Frye
Of particular interest to students of Diaspora Studies, African American Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies and Latina American Studies
VèVè Clark Institute Recruitment Event
October 9, 2013
The VèVè Clark Institute for Engaged Scholars in African American Studies will hold a recruiting event on Thursday, October 24 from 4-6pm in Barrows 652. We hope to bring in freshman and sophomore majors or intended majors to enjoy a lovely dinner and hear from our current scholars and faculty mentors about the benefits and rewards of becoming involved.
New book by UC Berkeley African American Studies Lecturer Dr. Rickey Vincent
September 26, 2013
The new book by UC Berkeley African American Studies Lecturer Dr. Rickey Vincent is coming out on October 1st.
(It is available on amazon.com now, from Lawrence Hill Books)
“PARTY MUSIC: The Inside Story of the Black Panthers Band and How Black Power Transformed Soul Music” is a groundbreaking first hand account of the Black Panther Party’s foray into Rhythm and Blues, as well as an analytical treatment of the intersection between Soul Music and Black Consciousness.
Here is an interview/discussion of the book with Davey D on KPFA:
PARTY MUSIC reviews
From Publishers Weekly:
Party Music: The Inside Story of the Black Panthers’ Band and How Black Power Transformed Soul Music
Rickey Vincent. Lawrence Hill, $19.95 (400p) ISBN : 978-1-61374-492-5
It’s not common knowledge that the fiery Black Panthers organization had a rocking house band, the Lumpen, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but Vincent (Funk) sets the record straight in this book about a tight-knit group of activist musicians who sang their revolutionary ideology to the community. Although the band performed for less than a year, Vincent, a professor at the University of California-Berkeley, stresses the important role of music in black culture at that time, with the Lumpen piggybacking on the triumphs of James Brown, Sam Cooke, and Aretha Franklin, giving high-energy performances “of blackness, hyper-masculinity and hyperbole, of smack talk that put the Man in his place and exalted everything gloriously black.” If this well-detailed book accurately chronicles the funky black power groove of the Panther band, it truly succeeds in recapturing the mood of that turbulent time when Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panther Party stole national attention with their bravado and purpose. Comprehensive, complex, and revealing, Vincent’s nostalgic journey provides an insider’s look at a remarkable band and a piercing snapshot of black history. (Oct.)
Reviewed on 08/09/2013
From Emory Douglas:
"Rickey Vincent, The Funk Master of the radio air waves has merged together in his book "Party Music" a wealth of comprehensive knowledge and insights about Panther Party Music and the history from which it evolved.
Rickey masters the art of interviewing and writing about the revolutionaries in "Party Music" with the same will power and self determination as the Funk Masters he writes about, an amazing achievement."
-Emory Douglas,
Former Minister of Culture & Revolutionary Artist,
Black Panther Party, 1967-1981"
From Davey D:
There are not enough words to describe the groundbreaking analysis and in depth musical and political history lessons skillfully laid out by the Rickey 'The Uhuru Maggot' Vincent' in his new book 'Party Music'.. This book not only brings to life the overlooked contributions of the Black Panthers funk band the Lumpen, but it also captures, the hopes, triumphs, challenges, victories and setbacks of a generation that was determined to find its voice during one of our country's most turbulent times..
Party Music is not just about the Lumpen but also about the Black power Movement and Freedom struggles they were a part of.. This book breathes new life into the many of the organizations and leaders who bravely challenged the system and have been all but removed from current versions of our History books. From The Black Panthers to US to the Black Arts Movement to SNCC.. No stone is left unturned.
Where Rickey shines best is his breakdown of the music heroes and sheroes who were influenced and oftentimes a part of the Freedom struggle.. from Chaka Khan to Aretha Franklin to James Brown to Sam Cooke to Mtume, from Motown to Stax, Vincent doesn't miss a beat. Each word is a searing drum beat Each paragraph is a thumping bassline that leaves you holding up a clenched fist yelling Black Power and making one proud of the history Vincent unearths. This book is a serious game changer
Davey D
Hip Hop Historian Journalist
SF State, Hard Knock Radio
Until now, the story of The Lumpen has never been told. Comprised of four ‘rank & file’ Black Panther Party members, this politically charged R&B group left behind few recordings, but broke ground both musically and socially. Using the band’s own first person accounts, Ricky Vincent effortlessly weaves their personal story with the larger then life personalities and the pain-ridden struggles they encountered. Party Music captures an era when music and politics did mix, with all the subtlety of a Molotov Cocktail.
- Pat Thomas, author of Listen, Whitey! The sights and sounds of Black Power 1965-1975
"In most accounts of the Black Power revolution, the stoic nationalist and the ultra-cool soul brother/sister never meet; culture and politics don't dance together. But here Rickey Vincent reveals a lost but fecund moment from a brief era of ferment when the Black Panthers and James Brown were both at their creative peaks. In this brilliant and riveting book on the Panthers' funk band The Lumpen—and the sweep of culture and politics that produced them—Vincent conjures the rhythms of the revolution and gets everyone dancing to the music again."
—Jeff Chang, author of Who We Be: The Colorization of America and Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation
The Black Panther Party remains one of the most compelling stories of radical Democracy in the 20th Century. In his new book Party Music, Rickey Vincent provides the soundtrack—that soulful and funky place where “Power to the People” meets “The One.”
—Mark Anthony Neal, author Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities
Mark Anthony Neal
Professor, African & African-American Studies
Duke University
Rickey Vincent, our Minister of Funk among music writers, has unearthed in splendid fashion a little known facet of the Black Panther Party: it's funk band The Lumpen. Party Music, the richly contextualized story of this collective, deepens our understanding of the strategic cultural position of the Black Panthers in American society by bringing to life the "soul" of the organization. With this bold contribution, Vincent shows just how liberating "the One" was at this important historical juncture.
Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. is the author of Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop and The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History and the Challenge of Bebop.
Congratulations Aya de Leon
September 13, 2013
It is with great pleasure that we share with you that Aya de Leon has been appointed as a Continuing Lecturer in African American Studies. Join us in congratulating Aya on this accomplishment.
21st Anniversary St. Clair Drake Symposium
April 30, 2013
BLACK FOLK HERE AND THERE: EXPLORING THE LIFE & HISTORY OF THEN & NOW
Edwin Okong’o, ‘storyteller by any medium necessary’
March 26, 2013
By Cathy Cockrell, NewsCenter
BERKELEY — There’s the joke about a fast-food-chain hire hunting high and low for something referred to in the employee manual as a “spatula.” And the one about paying Western Union $9 to send Michelle Obama $5 for her husband’s election campaign.
As Edwin Okong’o knows firsthand, the immigrant experience includes “a lot of suffering,” but it’s also “a gold mine” for humor. Put fellow Africans “through the journey” again — whether as featured funnyman on the Africa Channel’s “Africa Laughs,” or as the night’s entertainment at an African-immigrant community event — and you can get them “cracking up left and right,” he’s learned. (His email signature: “With the fearful strain that is on me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die.” — Abraham Lincoln.)
A standup comic as well as a UC Berkeley Swahili instructor and journalism grad, Okongo’s many titles include public-radio host, writer, reporter, video producer, husband and father, as well. His trademarked tagline offers a unifying theme: “A storyteller by any medium necessary.”
Born in 1974 in rural Kenya, where the oral tradition is strong, Okong’o was exposed early on to his elders’ uses of body language, suspense and a sense of authority to weave a spellbinding tale. More stories came by way of radio and newspapers, which “transported us from the village and took us elsewhere” — Nairobi, London, the United States, he recalls. “We had no pictures, absolutely nothing.”
Big dreams
But each day the whole village would gather around a portable radio to listen to news broadcasts, music and plays. “You could not make noise,” Okong’o says. “Someone would beat you if you did.”
His fascination with radio dates to that time. “How does it work?” he wondered as a youngster. “What does a studio look like? How does that guy get in such a small box? And how come he’s in every box?”
Little did he know that he’d one day co-host a live weekly radio show in the U.S.A. (It’s called “Africa Mix,” featuring music from the continent – “anything with a cool beat and catchy hook,” he says — and airs Thursdays, 9 to 11 p.m., on KALW, 91.7 FM.)
Likewise, if someone brought a copy of a newspaper from a bigger town, “we would read it from end to end,” then “take it into our mud hut and line the walls, and re-read it every day,” Okong’o recalls.
One newspaper writer — the author of a humorous, illustrated column on everyday life in Kenya’s cities and countryside — inspired Okong’o to “think about telling stories I heard in the village” and to be “always alert to what is going on.”
“The more I read him,” he says, “the more I wanted to tell stories, to be a journalist.”
As fate would have it, an uncle in the United States helped Okong’o move to the U.S., at 20, and get a foothold in the San Francisco Bay Area. Eight years later, after being laid off of a warehouse job, he summoned the courage to enroll at Cal State Hayward (now East Bay). There, he gained confidence as he realized that his own writing surpassed that of some fellow mass communications students, who laughed at his accent and whose first language was English. With encouragement, he applied to UC Berkeley’s graduate program in journalism, where he specialized in long-form writing and radio.
Grammar + culture
A lecturer, now, at his alma mater, Okong’o is known for weaving songs and stories about African culture into his instruction of Swahili, the national language of Kenya and the lingua franca of much of East Africa.
“I give them the good and the bad, so they can understand,” he says of the cultural insights he imparts about Africa. “I’m not like the media that gives only the bad.” Should his students visit East Africa, he hopes that rather than “rashly condemning” cultural practices they don’t agree with, they’ll understand where people “are coming from, and try to convince them otherwise. In my opinion, that’s how culture should be taught.”
The resilient storyteller speaks his truth whenever opportunity knocks. During the 2008 presidential election, he returned to East Africa to make a PBS Frontline documentary on his countrymen’s reaction to the U.S. presidential candidate with Kenyan roots. “Sweet Home, Obama” was a People’s Voice winner at the 2009 Webby Awards.
His essay “The Day I Became a Man,” on the circumcision ritual that marks Kenyan boys’ passage to manhood, was a finalist for an award from the Society of Professional Journalists; he won accolades for his coverage of the African-immigrant community while editor of the Minneapolis-based newspaper “Mshale.”
Okongo’s current storytelling project is a memoir exploring the abuse that he and many others in post-colonial African societies have been subjected to at home and in school, as children, and the toll it takes on their self-esteem.
“The book will be published,” he quips — in dead earnest — “as soon as it finds a publisher interested in an African story that lacks child soldiers, disease and famine.”
The Archive and the Aftermath: Bad Friday Director's Screening and Panel Discussion
March 12, 2013
Film – Documentary | March 14 | 6-8 p.m. | Banatao Auditorium, Sutardja Dai Hall (CITRIS)
Sponsors: English Department, African American Studies Department, Geography Department, Townsend Center
Panelists: Deborah Thomas (film director; Anthropology, UPenn); Nadia Ellis (English, Berkeley); Joshua Jelly Schapiro (Geography, Berkeley); Donald Moore (Anthropology, Berkeley)
In 2011 renowned anthropologist and African Diaspora scholar Deborah Thomas co-directed Bad Friday, a film documenting a largely forgotten event in modern Jamaican history and the development of Rastafari culture. During the so-called Coral Gardens “incident” in 1963, Jamaica’s newly independent government rounded up, jailed, and tortured a large group of Rastafarians. Thomas and her collaborators explore this story by turning their cameras on Rastas in rural western Jamaica who memorialize Coral Gardens in a yearly event of commemoration. Bad Friday raises questions about the status of the archive in the long aftermath of violence, the role of historical memory in modern Jamaica, and the relationship of local stories to global diasporic culture. Deborah Thomas will engage in a post-screening discussion of the film and these related issues with discussants Nadia Ellis (English), Joshua Jelly-Schapiro (Geography), and Donald Moore (Anthropology).
Deborah Thomas is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of numerous essays and two important studies about the Caribbean and global black identity: Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica (Duke UP, 2004) and Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica (Duke UP, 2011).
Event Contact: nellis@berkeley.edu
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DEBORAH THOMAS: “GLOBALIZATION AND RACE: TRANSFORMATION IN THE CULTURAL PRODUCTION OF BLACKNESS”
Colloquium | March 13 | 3:40-5 p.m. | 575 McCone Hall
Event Contact: klvogt@berkeley.edu, 510-642-3903
Jason Kidd, Isiah Thomas lend support to value of education at fundraising dinner
March 12, 2013
By Sean Wagner-McGough | Staff
It’s not everyday Isiah Thomas and Jason Kidd are in the same room. It happened on Sunday night though, right here at Cal.
In Memorial Stadium, the two NBA greats lent their voices in an effort to raise money for the African American Studies department and the campus for the Renaissance Night Gala.
While the two stars were tasked to speaking to the guests at the Gala, the two were made available to a shockingly small media gathering. Both their messages were simple throughout the gala: value your education.
“We as athletes, celebrities, role-models — whatever it is you want to call us — we do have a responsibility to give back and to promote and present the right message,” Thomas said. “And the right message is: education is important and needs to be valued again.”
The surprisingly soft-spoken Thomas was also eager to talk about his alma mater, Indiana. When asked about the current landscape of college basketball as March Madness draws nearer, the former Hoosier could barely contain his excitement for their national championship chances.
“I still wear the red and white,” Thomas said. “I’m hoping Indiana still goes all the way.”
Thomas, who is currently studying at UC Berkeley for his Masters degree in education, would later add that he hoped Cal would be the other team in the finals.
For Kidd, he couldn’t have been happier to return back to his old stomping grounds. However, upon his return, it became evident that some aspects may have changed since 1994, the year he left for the NBA.
“When I was here, people were walking around naked, which I don’t think they do anymore,” Kidd said with a wide-grin on his face. “You were always going to see something different on campus.”
Like Thomas, Kidd was also eager to speak about the importance of education. For the 39 year-old point guard, he’s realized the value of an education even more now that his 19-year NBA career is slowly coming to a close.
And while the New York Knickerbocker is focused on basketball for the time being, Kidd doesn’t want to throw away a life of sports after his playing days are over. In fact, the one time Golden Bear aspires to be in the front office for a professional franchise.
“For me, after basketball, you have to something else — your next chapter in life,” Kidd said. “I would love to go into coaching or front office of a professional sport, not just basketball. Maybe football or baseball.”
“I’d love the opportunity to put the pieces of the puzzle together to have a winning team.”
In attendance was Cal basketball star Allen Crabbe. As the season winds down for the Bears, the junior guard will decide to either turn pro next season or return to Berkeley for his senior season.
Kidd himself had a similar decision to make after his sophomore season in 1994, before ultimately opting to declare for the NBA draft.
When asked about any advice Kidd would give Crabbe if the young star called up the veteran, Kidd asserted that Crabbe needed to gather all the information and make a decision that he’s entirely comfortable with.
“(He needs to be) making sure that it’s in his heart,” Kidd said.
But the advice Kidd would give Crabbe was not just for the current Cal men’s basketball star; it was relevant to any student athlete at Cal. His words of wisdom were just as simple as the theme of education throughout the night: Enjoy the moment, because it’ll end before you know it.
“Be patient….and really enjoy the moment and the experience at Cal,” Kidd said. “It’s something you’ll never forget.”
TALK TUESDAY 3/5: Afro-Caribbeans and the 18th c. German Archive of Slavery
March 5, 2013
The Department of African American Studies presents a talk by visiting scholar
Heike Raphael-Hernandez
University of Maryland University College, Europe / University of Potsdam, Germany
“Literate Agency: Black Caribbean Empowerment & 18th c. Moravian Church Mission Documents”
Discussant: Professor Ugo Nwokeji, Department of African American Studies
Abstract:
A letter written in 1739 to the Danish king, Christian VI., by enslaved Afro-Caribbean Moravians, in which they protest plantation owners’ continued harassment and mistreatment of their missionary work among fellow slaves… Interviews about their former daily lives back in Africa before their captivity… Letters of encouragement and greetings to fellow Native American Moravians in the continental U.S. with reports about their own daily struggles with plantation owners…
Moravian archives include texts that were written by enslaved and free Afro-Caribbean Moravian members themselves. In addition to the above-mentioned texts, they include, for example, Lebensläufe that can be regarded as small autobiographies all members wrote during the course of their life and that were intended to be read at their funeral as last words and greetings to the congregation. One finds also letters to the communities in Bethlehem, PA and Herrnhut in Europe about daily church and missionary activities. These documents have to be read in very critical ways because these Caribbean Moravian missionary communities were themselves not free of their immediate surroundings’ attitudes and constrains. However, it is with the Moravian missionary community that their African members, enslaved and free, experienced a disruption of racial hierarchies. Because of the belief and practice of total equality and respect Moravian missionaries had for all their members, African members learned not only to read and write—even if the primary goal was to study holy scripture—but also to hold a variety of administrative and theological positions in their congregations.
A close reading of these documents allows one to claim that these texts testify to enslaved Africans’ ability of stealing one’s body out of slavery by performing expressive and literate acts of freedom. These acts can be read as acts of refusal to be dispossessed which consequently lead to an atmosphere that allowed an awakening of possibilities of identities of protests.
Bio
Heike Raphael-Hernandez is Professor of English at the University of Maryland University College, European Division. Currently, she is also the Interim Professor for American Studies at the University of Potsdam, Germany. Her research interests include Diasporic Cultures in intercultural and interracial contexts. She is the editor of Blackening Europe: The African American Presence (Routledge 2004) and AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics (co-edited with Shannon Steen, NYU Press 2006). She is author of Contemporary African American Women Writers and Ernst Bloch’s Principle of Hope (Edwin Mellen Press, 2008). She has just completed a manuscript examining film and the global South.
Cops & Robbers: A one-man play
February 20, 2013
Hip Hop artist Jinho "Piper" Ferreira plays 15 characters that show the intersections between law enforcement, the media, and the Black community.
Black Graduation
February 14, 2013
Keynote speaker: Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins Chief Executive Officer of Green For All The theme for this year's graduation is: Proclaiming our Freedom: Paving the Way for a Better Black America. Student Speaker auditions begin Friday, May 10, 2013, 10:30–12:00pm 652 Barrows Hall For more information visit the Black Graduation page
Photos From Professor Mchombo’s Group Trip To Kenya
February 13, 2013
Renaissance Night
February 13, 2013
UC Berkeley African American Department Honors Athlete Scholars
Host: Marc Lamont Hill- Celebrity Personality
Keynote Speaker: Isiah Thomas- NBA Hall of Famer
Special Guests
* Amar'e Stoudemire- New York Knicks
* Shareef Abdur-Rahim- Former NBA Players & Sac Kings Asst Coach
6:00pm -Pre- Reception
7:00pm- Dinner Program
For more information contact D. R. Roberts Event Mgmt 510 654-5335 or email droberts@robertsevents.com
Black History Month Events
February 13, 2013
The schedule for the talks is below:
* February 5 - Jordan Camp
* February 12 - Simone Browne
* February 19 - Nikki Jones
* February 26 - Joao Vargas
The topics are:
Jordan Camp - Interpreting the Crisis: Race,
Housing, and the Carceral Turn in Los Angeles
Simone Browne - B(R)anding Blackness: Biometric
Technology and the Surveillance of Blackness
Nikki Jones - "The camera rolls": What Video
Records Can Teach Us About Routine Encounters
Between Young Black Men and the Police
Joao Vargas - "War Theater: Police Operations
and Sport Mega Events in Rio de Janeiro
Recent Pictures From Black Wednesday
February 13, 2013
THE DIASPORA special issue on BlackLivesMatter
February 13, 2013
Insurgency: The Black Matter(s) Issue
The fall edition of The Diaspora, a biannual publication of the Department of African American Studies at UC Berkeley, is now live!
Please visit the link above and share widely.
"Black lives matter. However, what that actually means to people in different locations, with different experiences and different life chances is decidedly more complicated. The complexities of mobilizing against anti-Black racism is reflected in the naming of this issue—aiming to be in conversation with the ongoing struggles in the streets and the assertions of Black humanity online, while at the same time reflecting the peculiar position of Black scholars writing from the ivory tower. The title and contents of this issue are meant to engage with the roots of #BlackLivesMatter and to encapsulate the multiple meanings of being black, and how and why that matters in this moment of virulent suppression of Black bodies and the spectacular and mundane executions of black people."
The issue features contributions from African American Studies Faculty, Staff, and Graduate Students: Robert Allen, Kenly Brown, Charisse Burden, Grace Gipson, Jarvis Givens, Essence Harden and Jihaari Terry, Aya de León, Ameer Loggins, Selina Makana, Michael McGee, Jr., Kimberly McNair, Na’ilah Suad Nasir, Ianna Hawkins Owen, Tianna Paschel, Vernessa Parker, Leigh Raiford, Gabriel Regalado, Fayia Sellu, and Ula Taylor.
This issue also includes a collaboratively written Solidarity Statement; cover art by Essence Harden and Jihaari Terry; and author names on the table of contents are linked to your department profiles.
We will also release a print issue in late Jan.