Department of History, UC Santa Barbara

Focal Point Dialogues in History: Conversations on Black life, race, and antiblackness in history with Prof. Nyasha Mboti and Prof. Steve Zipperstein
2023-04-12 13:00 - 15:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | HSSB 6020 (McCune Room), University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
The History Department’s Colloquium Committee warmly invites you to attend this year’s FOCAL POINT Dialogues in History series. Inspired by the History Department’s Statement on the George Floyd Uprising and its invocation to understand and interrogate our racialized past and the investments of disciplinary history within it, the series brings together History faculty and graduate students to engage in a dialogue on Black life, race, and antiblackness in history.
For our FOCAL POINT Dialogues in History series this year, the Colloquium Committee, after careful discussion, has decided to invite both Professor Steve Zipperstein and Professor Nyasha Mboti (Professor of Communication at the University of the Free State) to join us and have a dialogue with us on April 12 1-3PM at the McCune Conference Room.
Professor Zipperstein will talk about the important Waco/Branch Davidian standoff on its 30th anniversary. This talk will discuss how Waco (and a prior episode at Ruby Ridge, Idaho) laid the groundwork for the dangerous rise of anti-government white nationalism in the United States, leading to the January 2021 Trump-inspired attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Professor Mboti will talk about his new book, Apartheid Studies: A Manifesto, Vol. 1 (2023). The book utilizes the notion of “apartheid” as a paradigm and theoretical framework. It argues that apartheid is not quite what we were told or what we thought. Instead, seen from the experience and point of view of the oppressed, apartheid has astonishing virulence, prevalence, persistence, and undetectability. Apartheid Studies, in a word, is an interdisciplinary invitation to study how oppression, inequality, injustice, and harm persist, and what to do about it.
Steve and Nyasha will each talk for 30 minutes, and they will then engage in a conversation with each other and comment on each other’s talk for 15-20 minutes. Steve and Nyasha address antiblackness from different perspectives and positionalities, which will also greatly deepen our understanding of this issue. We will then open the floor and invite questions and comments from the audience.
Our department has purchased 34 PDF copies of Apartheid Studies, which have been made available on a Box folder. Graduate students: please contact Prof. Zheng if you want a copy of the book. Africa World Press has graciously agreed to share this book with interested graduate students.

The Deccani Trails of the St Andrews Qur'an Manuscript - Lecture by Dr. Keelan Overton
2023-04-12 16:00 - 17:30 | HSSB 3001E, 3001E Humanities and Social Sciences Building, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Shortly after its production in Safavid Tabriz or Herat, the single-volume Quran manuscript known as the “St Andrews Quran” traveled east to the Deccan region of southern India and circulated between four courtly contexts over the next two hundred years. The evidence for this dynamic life history is found in the codex itself, and this talk summarizes the findings of a multi-year interdisciplinary archaeological excavation of the manuscript. Weaving between the object, archive, and political realities of the Deccan sultanates, Mughal court, and Tipu Sultan, I consider how the St Andrews Quran inspires the writing of ground-based art histories that challenge prevailing taxonomies.
This event is organized by the King Abdul Aziz In Saud Chair in Islamic Studies.
