The History Department’s Colloquium Committee warmly invites you to attend the keynote lecture of our FOCAL POINT Dialogues in History series. The lecture, “Body, Soul & Subject: A History of Difference in the Early-Modern African Atlantic,” will be delivered by Prof. Herman L. Bennett. Herman L. Bennett is Professor at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. A scholar […]
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Dr. Sylvester Ogbechie‘s work evaluates the resurgence of African gods in Black Atlantic modernisms, contemporary media and Afrofuturist visualities. African deities are everywhere in contemporary culture from the Akan trickster god Anansi and numerous Yoruba Orisa in the American Gods TV series, through images of the Kh’Met (Egyptian) goddess Bast in the Afrofuturist blockbuster movie Black Panther, to the cyberspace […]
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Warfare migrates. This has never been more apparent than in the era when the violence of imperial expansion and enslavement transformed Europe, Africa, and the Americas, as they interacted across the Atlantic Ocean. European imperial conflicts extended the dominion of capitalist agriculture. African battles fed captives to the transatlantic trade in slaves. Masters and their human property struggled with one […]
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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 […]
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How might we re-write the history and historiography of religion, race, and art in Latin America, the Caribbean and the Atlantic world? Prof. Andrea Guerrero-Mosquera (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco) will discuss the role of historians in uncovering and debating ideas about the past of people of African descent during the colonial period. She invites us to consider the ways art, material […]
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During the interwar period, the historic neighborhood of Harlem was home to a thriving Black political scene that included Garveyites, Communists, labor organizers, anticolonial activists, and politicized adherents of various new Black religious congregations. Shaykh Daoud Faisal and Mother Khadijah Faisal, the architects of New York City’s first lasting Black Sunni Muslim community worked as artists, organizers, and propagators of […]
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Speaking before a rapt audience, famed black nationalist leader, Marcus Garvey, vowed to support the cause of African liberation not only in life, but also in death, insisting that he would return as an “earthquake, or a cyclone, or plague, or pestilence” to aid in the fight for freedom. He implored his followers: “Look for me in the whirlwind.” Using […]
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Throughout the twentieth century, Black women in the United States experienced at least double the rates of infant mortality experienced by white women. Through an analysis of oral histories collected in the US South in the 1930s, Dr. LaKisha Simmons (University of Michigan) details what Patricia Hill Collins terms a “Black women’s standpoint on mothering.” From interviewees’ discussions of infant […]
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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 […]
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