LECTURES/EVENTS

Tuesday, November 17, 2009
"Black Malinche: The Black Woman as Traitor in African American Thought and Politics."
Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd, J.D., PH.D.
6:30PM, Room 9204/9205, The Graduate Center

Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd is Assistant Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies and an Associate Member of the Political Science Graduate Faculty at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, a lawyer and a political scientist. An award-winning educator, she teaches a range of courses on Black feminist theory, Black women’s political activism, and race, gender, media, and the law. Dr. Alexander-Floyd is the author of Gender, Race, and Nationalism in Contemporary Black Politics (Palgrave Macmillan 2007), and her articles have appeared in leading journals such as The International Journal of Africana Studies, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, Politics & Gender, and PS: Political Science & Politics.

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Wednesday, December 9, 2009
"Looking For a Few Good Men: A Racing-Gendering Analysis of Family Promotion Policies."
Julia Jordan-Zachery, J.D., PH.D.
6:30PM, Room 9207, The Graduate Center

Current social policies designed to fix the Black family are aimed at rehabilitating Black manhood. Dr. Jordan-Zachery examines the implications of focusing policy on Black manhood. She asks, can this “save” Black folk? She also examines the impact of this approach on Black women. The talk offers an analysis of the current efforts to address "Negro Pathology" as argued by U.S Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Julia Jordan-Zachery is the Director of Black Studies, and an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Providence College. She is the author of Black Women, Cultural Images and Social Policy (Routledge 2008); winner of the 2009 National Conference of Black Studies Best Book Award. Her articles have appeared in numerous journals including: “Let Men be Men: A Gendered Analysis of Black Ideological Response to Familial Policies.” National Political Science Review, “Am I a Black Woman or a Woman who is Black? A Few Thoughts on the Meaning of Intersectionality?” Politics & Gender, “The Female Bogeyman: Political Implications of criminalizing Black Women.” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, and “Black Womanhood and Social Welfare Policy: The Influence of Her Image on Policy Making.” Sage Race Relations Abstract.
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The Audre Lorde/Essex Hemphill Memorial Lecture

Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Hortense Spillers
Skylight Room, the Graduate Center

Hortense Spillers, is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor in English at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of, most recently, Black, White, and Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture.

Inaugurated by Hortense Spillers, the Lorde/Hemphill lLecture is meant to commemorate the lives of the American poets, Audre Lorde (1934-1992) and Essex Hemphill (1957-1995), as well as to encourage exciting scholarship and literary production within the communities to whom their poetry and prose spoke.

Co-sponsored by the Africana Studies Concentration and IRADAC

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IRADAC presents the Africana Studies Dissertation Discussions Fall 2009 -Spring 2010

As part of IRADAC's committment, to create an environment which elevates the academic experience of students at the Graduate Center, members of the Africana Studies Group are invited to lecture to an audience, consisting primarily of their peers, on dissertation/research topics. These lectures are designed to facilitate intellectual exchange between graduate students. The general configuration of these events will be a lecture followed by discussions, comments and question & answer. Open to the public. All dates are on Wednesdays. The event time is 12:00pm - 2:00pm.

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September 30, 2009
"When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong: Racial Authenticity, Academia and the Black Intellectual in Percival Everett’s Erasure."
Lavelle Porter
Room 8400/8402

This presentation is part of a dissertation project on academic novels and the politics of the black intellectual. Percival Everett’s satirical novel Erasure (1999) examines the significance of “authenticity” in black literary and cultural production. This presentation will survey the historical background of authenticity depicted in Everett’s novel, and will consider the ways in which black artists and intellectuals have conformed to and resisted the discourse of racial authenticity in their work.

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October 7, 2009
"Carrying the State’s Burden: Civil Society’s Role in South Africa’s Xenophobia Crisis"
Kaja Tretjak and Elan Abrell
Room 8301/8304, The Graduate Center

This presentation documents South African civil society's involvement in the xenophobia crisis response, focusing on the application of strategies developed over a decade of activism around HIV/AIDS to the range of human rights issues raised by the crisis. In particular, it examines the use of social justice legal activism to fortify the expansive rights guaranteed by the South African Constitution. The presentation further situates these organizations' efforts surrounding the crisis within the context of expanding abrogation of state responsibility and its transfer onto civil society, as well as xenophobic state practices that have set the stage for state inaction in the present case.

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October 28, 2009
“The World Is Yours: Post-Colonial Worlds in the Stand-Up Comedy of Jackie “Moms” Mabley and Richard Pryor."
H. Alexander Welcome
Room 8301/8304

This presentation explores the links that Mabley and Pryor make between colonialism and violence. Both posit violence as a phenomenon that can ground one in the present and as an important aspect of the workings of colonialism: an impulse indicative of colonialism’s aspiration to be perpetually active. General post-colonial theories about violence-based interruptions of colonial’s continuity are provided, as well as specific textual examples from the stand-up of Mabley and Pryor.

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November 11, 2009
"Strategies of Solidarity: Exploring Solidarity, Race, and Identity Amongst Afro-Caribbean Domestics in NYC".
Christine Pinnock
Room 8301/8304, The Graduate Center

This presentation seeks to explore the notion of solidarity and how it exists amongst domestic workers in New York City with a special attention on Afro-Caribbean domestics. It will examine any common understanding of solidarity within this marginalized segment of the labor force, and present the ways in which domestic workers in New York city have utilized strategies of solidarity to negotiate economic and social marginalization in their everyday labor experiences. Historical and contemporary examinations of solidarity fail to address how solidarity manifests itself in the day to day experiences of people, and the treatment of Afro-Caribbean domestics has been confined to a specific engagement surrounding domestic work and the effects of global economic features/transformations. Ms. Pinnock will indentify the limits of previous research on Afro-Caribbean domestic workers and demonstrate the importance of understanding how solidarity manifests itself in the quotidian their experiences.

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December 9, 2009
"Race and Real Estate: The End of the African American Welcome in Harlem, 1904."
Kevin McGruder
Room 8301/8304, The Graduate Center

The movement of large numbers of African Americans to Harlem in the first decades of the twentieth century has often been used as a symbol of the establishment of similar large urban black communities in northern cities. The common characterization of such transitions as invasions by blacks met with resistance from longtime white residents, became the foundation for later studies of these communities. In reality the racial changes in Harlem were more complex. There was already an African American community in Harlem when black numbers began to grow. All whites were not hostile to the black newcomers. Using real estate transactions as a lens, this talk will focus on the varied responses of whites to an increasing number of blacks in Harlem, and the strategies used by African Americans to employ ownership of real estate as a means of establishing a community that they could control.

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February 17, 2010

Ted Sammons
Room 9207, The Graduate Center

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March 10, 2010
“Resurrecting the Black Female Body: Returning to the Wound in Robbie McCauley’s Sally’s Rape and Suzan Lori Parks’ Venus”
Stacie McCormick
Room 9207, The Graduate Center

The black female slave and Saartjie Baartman (most well known as the Hottentot Venus) are perhaps the most iconic examples of black female bodily exploitation in Western cultural consciousness. Robbie McCauley’s Sally’s Rape and Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus, both contemporary and controversial plays, re-introduce these women on the stage as a kind of resurrection, one that depicts the ways in which black women’s bodies have been exploited and defined from the early 19th century and on. These playwrights’ depictions allow the contemporary audience to be witnesses to significant accounts of black female bodily exploitation and the various and unacknowledged pain that black women have and continue to experience as a result. The presentation will explore the above ideas as well as contextualize the works in the larger project of the dissertation which examines the notion of the “open wound” as a metaphor for representation of the black female body in black women’s literature. Scholars that inform the project are Elaine Scarry, Cathy Caruth, Saidiya Hartman among others.

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March 24, 2010
"The Correspondence of Edward Dorn and Amiri Baraka: A New Look at African American Poetics in the 1960s"
Claudia Pisano
Room 9206, The Graduate Center

Edward Dorn and Amiri Baraka: The Collected Letters presents the correspondence of American poets Edward Dorn and Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) between 1959 and 1965. Having seen several poems of Dorn’s in small literary magazines, Baraka began writing to him with praises and a request for poems for his own enterprise, Yugen. This correspondence becomes the primary ground for a wide range of discussions, from quotidian observations of being snowbound without enough heat or being overdressed on an overly warm spring day to the hashing out of experiences, fears, rages, and anxieties directly related to the socio-political culture of the early 1960s: bar fights around race matters, an aggravated police presence around fears of agitation and protests. A look at the complete set of letters finds them formative and showing signs of what is to come later: by 1965, knowledge, beliefs, actions, friendships, and alliances had shifted drastically, setting the stage for a highly tumultuous late 1960s.

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April 7, 2010
"Ethics and Writing in the 'New South Africa"
Lily Saint
Room 9207, The Graduate Center

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April 21, 2010

Simone White
Room 9206, The Graduate Center

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FACULTY AND STUDENT DEVELOPMENT