Department of History, UC Santa Barbara

ISRRAR Event–Dr. Samiha Rahman, "Redefining Black Excellence: Ihsan, Islamic Education, and the Tijani Sufi Order"
2021-03-09 16:00 - 18:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Zoom, CA
Since the 1980s, hundreds of predominantly working-class African American Muslim youth have migrated to the West African Tijani Sufi town of Medina Baye, Senegal. They hope to circumvent the antiblackness, Islamophobia, and economic inequality they face in the U.S. in search of a transformative educational encounter in a society where Blackness and Islam constitute the dominant norms. This talk chronicles these young people’s everyday experiences pursuing Islamic education in Medina Baye. Complicating popular notions that link Black excellence to individualistic material gain and Black capitalism, Dr. Samiha Rahman (CSU Long Beach) argues that Black Muslim excellence (ihsan) provides an alternative paradigm rooted in the pursuit of human excellence through spiritual and social practice. Grounded in a transatlantic Black Muslim tradition, Black Muslim ihsan offers African American Muslims pathways to individual and collective liberation.
Join this Zoom event here: bit.ly/3hVdvP4

This event is part of the ISRRAR Winter Quarter series.
Professor Butch Ware and the ISRRAR announce the Winter Quarter schedule for HIST 210RA: Race, Faith, Revolution. Graduate students are invited to register for this 2-unit seminar and to sign up for the listserv at http://tinyurl.com/ISRRARListServ.
How have Black metaphysics articulated with racial politics in order to advance efforts of justice, liberation, and self-actualization? In this very special year of 2021, our seminar will take on manifestations of anti-black racism and imperialism, as well as African and African Diasporic efforts to mediate between the seen and unseen worlds in struggles for justice.
This graduate seminar is part of a broader collaborative process meant to engage graduate students and faculty alike. The Initiative for the Study of Race, Religion, and Revolution (ISRRAR) seeks to foster a conversation on intersections of spirituality and social change wherein works on (and by) formerly colonized peoples are central, rather than peripheral.
This approach is driven by an axial critique of the ways in which modernity’s core contradictions shape our shared pasts and presents. An era of revolutionary enlightenment, we are told, brought humanity out of the ‘dark ages.’ Freedom dawned. But this ‘age of lights’ brought the darkest of racial taxonomies, and scales of slavery and human suffering unknown to ancient and medieval worlds. Reason proclaimed its mission: liberate humanity from the bondage of irrational religion. Yet rational political economies brought global empires, world wars, and ethnic genocides. Moreover, new nationalisms have drawn on older religious repertories to define citizens and subject them to moral authority. Self-congratulatory Western tropes, however, tend to overlook the ubiquity of race and the persistence of faith, portraying them as incidental rather than fundamental.
Colonized peoples in Africa and the Americas, tell different tales. A generation of emergent scholarship has brought these forward. Scholars (many trained in interdisciplinary fields) have recovered ‘native’ narratives and ontologies of the oppressed, often dislodging dominant meta-narratives in the study of the global West. In History 210 we engage live presentations of the works of scholars, activists, and artists whose conceptualization and execution of their research breaks new ground in these domains.

IHC Talk: Utathya Chattopadhyaya, "Cannabis and South Asia"
2021-03-09 16:00 - 18:00
The IHC‘s Asian/American Studies Collective welcomes UCSB History professor Utathya Chattopadhyaya for a talk on the role of cannabis in South Asian experiences of empire.
Historical scholarship now conceives empire as a webbed uneven field of power relations and a multispecies enterprise. In other words, the anxious and breathless struggle of European imperialism to sustain itself subjected human, plant, animal, and insect bodies to its ambition to govern through logics of colonial difference. This paper argues that the cannabis plant in South Asia, in the nineteenth century, while being a subject of British revenue systems transformed into a race-d and gendered mode of explaining anticolonial insurgency by South Asian rebels. The intoxicating substance of the plant, in the discursive logic of empire, was seen to vitiate Asian bodies against European power. Cannabis also animated other imperial operations like the delegitimization of Indian sovereignty. Using the expansive reach of imperial periodical culture in the nineteenth century, this paper highlights the Asian and global contexts within which cannabis became an alibi for rebellion or violence against empire.
Utathya Chattopadhyaya is Assistant Professor of History at the UC Santa Barbara. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois and studies the history of modern South Asia, British imperialism, and agrarian commodities. His work has appeared in the South African Historical Journal, Historical Reflections, and Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for our Times. He is currently writing a monograph on cannabis and empire in British India.
This event will be held on Zoom at https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/81976204749?pwd=[REDACTED]

FOCAL POINT Dialogues in History Webinar II: Empire and Liberation
2021-03-12 13:00
Building on the collective knowledge shared in our first webinar, the History Department’s Colloquium Committee warmly invites you to attend the second session of our 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 UCSB History faculty and graduate students who have volunteered to lead a dialogue on Black life, race, and antiblackness in history. The conversations will engage Herman Bennett’s African Kings and Black Slaves, as a focal point to discuss themes like sovereignty, empire, and racial capitalism from different historical angles of vision.
Our second webinar will engage Prof. Herman Bennett’s emphasis on empire and colonialism in understanding Atlantic history and the politics of liberation from a wide diversity of scholarly standpoints. Registration for the webinar is required. Please click on the link below to register.
Date: Mar 12, 2021
Time: 1:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Webinar II: Empire and Liberation
Zoom registration: Please register in advance for this webinar using the link below.
https://ucsb.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_kI2R6miRRO2blZUh_62shQ
Featuring presentations by Anthony Greco, Katie Moore, Stephan Miescher, and Ya Zuo
Comment by Evelyne Laurent-Perrault

Anthony Greco is a historian of engineering and technology, colonialism, and science in the modern Middle East. His dissertation research examines Egypt’s long tradition of scientific knowledge and pedagogy. Before this, he worked as a diesel mechanic, plumber, and carpenter which inspired his interest in builders and maintainers of public works.
Katie Moore is a historian of early American political economy, money, debt, and the Atlantic World, and the author of the forthcoming A Revolutionary Currency.
Stephan Miescher is a historian of nineteenth and twentieth century Ghana, masculinities, and environmental history, and the author of Making Men in Ghana (2005) and coeditor of Gender, Imperialism, and Global Exchanges (2015).
Ya Zuo is a historian of middle and late imperial China, epistemology, political philosophy, ethics, and emotions, and the author of Shen Gua’s Empiricism (2018).
Evelyne Laurent-Perrault is a historian of the African diaspora in colonial Latin America and the Caribbean, the political imagination of enslaved women, and the author of the forthcoming Claims of Dignity.
