Epic Voices: The Caribbean (Un)Epic with M. NourbeSe Philip

3:00pm – 6:00pm
1 June 2019
Poets House
10 River Terrace, New York, NY 10282
Admission $10, $7 for students and seniors, free to Poets House members.

followed by

Zong!: A Collective Reading with King, Diggs, Henry-Smith & Hunt

6:00pm – 8:00pm
1 June 2019
Poets House
10 River Terrace, New York, NY 10282
Admission Free and open to the public

Poet M. NourbeSe Philip writes: “That ‘micropelago’ of tiny islands that arc in one long ache from Cuba to Guyana to enclose the Caribbean Sea (the Cari Basin) from the encroaching Atlantic Ocean; place and space of massive ‘interruckshuns,’ where tectonic plates of history grind against each other and shards of memory pierce and transfix green islands seeded with the spores of Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Indigenous: if places could be said to represent poetic forms or genres, the (un)epic would seem to be the Caribbean’s most natural form.” For Epic Voices: The Caribbean (Un)Epic with M. NourbeSe Philip at 3pm, join Philips as she draws on poets of Caribbean/Cari Basin heritage as she discusses her book Zong!, as well as her manuscript Island Liturgies, in the context of the (un)epic.

This event is co-presented with Belladonna and the Canadian Consulate.

After the (Un)Epic talk, stick around for Zong!: A Collective Reading with King, Diggs, Henry-Smith & Hunt at 6pm. Join Rosamond S. King, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Sean Henry-Smith, and Erica Hunt for a free collective reading/performance of Zong!. The poets use word, song, and bodies to interpret the book, the text of which is based entirely on historical documents relating to a 1781 massacre of 150 Africans on the slave ship Zong.

Above text and images adapted from webpage.

T&T’s “Hero” Lands in New York

Film Screening and Q&A with director, Frances-Anne Solomon

6:30pm 
30 May 2019
Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th Street, New York, NY 10023
Tickets available here

AND

4:15pm 
2 June 2019
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
144 West 65th Street, New York, NY 10023
Tickets available here

Director Frances-Anne Solomon’s acclaimed feature film HERO, inspired by Trinidad and Tobago war hero Ulric Cross, will have its U.S premiere at the 26th New York African Film Festival’s (NYAFF) Opening Night at Lincoln Center. A second screening will take place on June 2nd at 4:15pm at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center. Both screenings will include a Q&A afterward with the director. Tickets are $12-15 per person.  Continue reading T&T’s “Hero” Lands in New York

Nicole Dennis-Benn presents Patsy

Book Launch and conversation with Tracy K. Smith

7:30pm 
4 June 2019
Greenlight Bookstore in Prospect Lefferts Gardens
632 Flatbush Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11225

Nicole Dennis-Benn, beloved and award-winning author of Here Comes the Sun, returns to Greenlight to present her searing new novel about the injustices—big and small—that immigrants, the working class, and women face every day. Patsy flows effortlessly between the story of the titular Patsy, who emigrates from Jamaica to New York in search of a freedom she’s never known, and the story of Tru, the daughter she leaves behind. While Patsy finds herself ironically working as a nanny after fleeing from parental expectations at home, Tru attempts to build a relationship with her father, though she never stops wondering where her mother has gone. As Dennis-Benn depicts the lives of Patsy and Tru over the course of a decade, the two women remain connected through their desire for a freedom beyond that which is available to them. Current U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith joins Dennis-Benn in conversation at Greenlight, followed by a festive reception with rum punch to celebrate the book’s launch.

Above images and text adapted from webpage.

 

IRADAC Presents a Round-Table: Critical Perspectives and Current Trends in Afro-Latinx Studies

6:30pm – 8:00pm
12 April 2019
CUNY Grad Center, Room C197

Round-table panel:

  • William Luis, Vanderbilt University
  • Sophie Maríñez, Borough of Manhattan Community College
  • Jill T. Richardson, The Graduate Center & Borough of Manhattan Community College
  • Silvio Torres-Saillant, Syracuse University

Moderated by Richard Pérez, John Jay College

Above text and image adapted from webpage.

The Jamaican 1950s: ​A Symposium

4-6 April 2019
University of Pennsylvania 

As we think about the long 1950s (1948-1962) in Jamaica, we think in terms of a series of displacements. The period begins with the sailing of the H.M.T. Empire Windrush to London, the establishment of the University of the West Indies, and Evon Blake’s integration of the Myrtle Bank pool. The 1949 elections result in another, though reduced, Jamaica Labour Party victory, and the solidification of the two-party system. Throughout the 1950s we see the beginnings of developmentalism in the aftermath of the Moyne Commission; the deepening of the Cold War and the expulsion of the left from the People’s National Party; the growth of Rastafari, and the emergence of scholarship on the movement; and the stirrings of a “folk” arts movement, as well as the emergence of aesthetic languages of painters like David Pottinger and Albert Huie. On the global stage, the 1950s inaugurates a growing recognition of Jamaican popular music through figures like Byron Lee and Don Drummond; of Jamaican sprinting prowess through Olympic medalists Arthur Wint, Herb McKenley, and George Rhoden; and of literary influence through the publication of Vic Reid’s New Day, Roger Mais’ Brother Man, and John Hearne’s Voices Under the Window, among others. The firm establishment of the social sciences at the UCWI and the appearance of texts like Douglass Hall’s Free Jamaica, and M.G. Smith’s work on pluralism generates an interrogation of both the legacies of the past and the promises of nationhood. Within other organs, too, these legacies and promises were publicly debated. The period also marks the moment during which questions of “women” and “gender” begin to emerge on the scene of scholarly, literary, and artistic production. The period ends with the dismantling of the West Indies Federation and the independence of Jamaica and Trinidad. 

The long 1950s, therefore, encompass the pivotal moments that set into motion the infrastructures of modern political, social, economic, and artistic activity. They also bring into relief struggles over the appropriate spheres of interaction – national, regional, pan-African, diasporic – thus inaugurating an ongoing process of disciplining (and challenging) the scales at which we have sought to organize and imagine our futures. By the end of the decade, we see that the earlier twentieth century story of an emergent civil society in Jamaica is displaced by the story of political society. The result of this has been a particular kind of formal decolonization, one that lacks some of the decolonial social and cultural visions of earlier moments, and one that also resists those forms of decoloniality being enacted in the popular realm. Looking at the long 1950s closely and patiently, therefore, gives us windows into the contestations over the scale and scope of Jamaica’s political futures during the moment just before they sedimented into nationalism.

Program
Thursday, 4 April
Halney Auditorium, The Penn Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology
Continue reading The Jamaican 1950s: ​A Symposium

Practicing Translation, Translating Politics

4-5 April 2019
Skylight Room
CUNY Grad Center

This symposium will mark the end of an academic year in which the Committee on Globalization and Social Change has engaged the issue of “Translation.” Taking a broad view of the topic, we have treated translation as a practice and process of carrying across, of thinking and acting across various types of boundaries, whether real, reified, or imagined. We are especially interested in the profound challenges, generative possibilities, and unanticipated outcomes that follow attempts to pursue, discover, or fashion connections across singular, incommensurable, and untranslatable domains. At a time when so many planetary predicaments require translocal responses and alternatives, the politics of translation – the peril and promise of carrying across – emerges as an especially timey issue. We hope that this gathering of scholars working in different fields and world areas from various theoretical perspectives will help us to think together about the entwined political, ethical, and aesthetic aspects of translation today.

Of special note for Caribbeanists is Session III of the Practicing Translation, Translating Politics symposium, at 3pm on Friday, featuring presentations by Kaiama L. Glover and Brent Hayes Edwards. Their presentations are entitled, “Blackness’ in French: On Translation, Haiti, and the Matter of Race” and “Diasporic Literature and the Task of the Black Translator,” respectively.

Continue reading Practicing Translation, Translating Politics

Caribbean Film Series: A 5th Anniversary Festival

14 – 17 March 2019
BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave.
Brooklyn, NY 11217

Description from the Caribbean Film Academy website: Caribbean cinema is at a high point critically and artistically, in the ways its filmmakers thrill, entertain, and inform audiences globally. This four-day festival marks the five-year anniversary of the Caribbean Film Series, providing an unparalleled platform to reflect on the Caribbean and its diasporic experiences, in new and unconventional ways.

***

Schedule of film screenings: Continue reading Caribbean Film Series: A 5th Anniversary Festival

Black Imaginaries, Scandinavian Diasporas

March 5-7, 2019

Join Jeannette Ehlers (Denmark/Trinidad), Ellen Nyman (Sweden), and La Vaughn Belle (St. Croix) for three events in a series of conversations on the aesthetics of decolonization. These artists will discuss how their art practices across different media are designed to provoke conversation about colonial legacies and contemporary racial politics on the ground in Sweden, Denmark, and St. Croix.

All events are free and open to the public.

Imagining Race in Scandinavia: Panel Discussion
Featuring Jeannette Ehlers, Ellen Nyman, and La Vaughn Belle, moderated by Monica Miller
6:00pm – 7:30pm
5 March 2019
Event Oval, Diana Center
3009 Broadway, New York, NY 10027

Faculty Seminar and Luncheon
Featuring Jeannette Ehlers, Ellen Nyman, and La Vaughn Belle
12:00pm – 1:30pm
6 March 2019
BCRW Conference Room, 6th Floor, Milstein Center
31 Claremont Avenue, New York, NY 10027
RSVP to Tami Navarro at tnavarro@barnard.edu

Artists’ Presentation
Featuring Jeannette Ehlers, Ellen Nyman, and La Vaughn Belle, Moderated by Tami Navarro
6:00pm
7 March 2019
Digital Humanities Center, Ground Floor, Milstein Center
31 Claremont Avenue, New York, NY 10027

Continue reading Black Imaginaries, Scandinavian Diasporas

VENEZUELA: What’s happening? What’s next?

6:30pm – 9pm
11 February 2019
King Juan Carlos Center, Auditorium 

New York University
RSVP here

For years Venezuela has been mired in a seemingly unending crisis – political impasse, economics chaos, social upheaval. Yet over the past two weeks that crisis appears, at last, to have reached a tipping point. A notoriously fractious opposition has rallied behind a single, youthful leader – Juan Guaidó – who has won the recognition and support of most of the western world. Meanwhile despite growing popular discontent even among former chavista strongholds, Nicolas Maduro remains in power with the support of the military as well as global players like Russia, China, and Turkey. As the stalemate grows and the crisis deepens, what possible futures are in store for Venezuela and it’s people? Is open war on the table? What role should the international community play? And how are Venezuelans themselves responding?

Join us for a conversation about the current situation in Venezuela by a panel of distinguished scholars and experts on the South American country and the region – Beatriz Borges, Dorothy Kronick, Francisco Rodríguez, and Christopher Sabatini. This conversation will be moderated by CLACS faculty members Patricio Navia (Liberal Studies) and Alejandro Velasco (Gallatin, History).

This event is free and open to the public. Co-sponsored by: Urban Democracy Lab, and North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA).

Above text adapted from webpage.

 

Afro-Latinidad in the African Diaspora

6pm – 8pm
12 February 2019
Carter Journalism Institute
20 Cooper Square, 7th Floor
New York, NY 10003
RSVP here

This event is organized by Liberal Arts Professor Kaia Shivers and co-sponsored by the Latinx Project.

With the onset of globalization and the consistent flow of people from Latin America to the United States, Afro-Latinx identity has gained visibility in public discourse. In turn, Black communities revisit the questions of diaspora, race and Latinidad in the Americas. Dr. Will Guzmán, Dr. Jillian Báez, Dr. Adedamola Osinulu and Dr. Donovan Ramon will discuss the intersections and emergence of Afro-Latinidad in the US and Latin America, and the complex meanings of identity and belonging in metropolises like New York City. Continue reading Afro-Latinidad in the African Diaspora

Annual Caribbean Writers Series at St. John’s University

with Gina Athena Ulysse

5pm – 7pm
7 February 2019
Little Theater
St. John’s University

About Gina Athena Ulysse:
Ulysse is a feminist artist-anthropologist-activist and self-described Post-Zora Interventionist. She was born in Pétion-Ville, Haïti. Her various creative projects include spokenword, performance art, and installation pieces. Her poetry has appeared in several journals and collections. Her books included Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, a Haitian Anthropologist and Self-Making in Jamaica (U of Chicago, 2008), the trilingual–English, French, Haitian Krèyol—Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle (Wesleyan UP, 2015), and Because When God Is Too Busy: Haiti, me & THE WORLD (Wesleyan UP, 2017). She is currently Professor of Anthropology at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.

Reception to follow the lecture/performance/reading, in the Inclusivity Resource Center (IRC).

Above text and image adapted from email.

New World Migration Lecture Series

5:00pm – 7:00pm
30 November 2018
History Lounge Room 5114
CUNY Grad Center

“The African Origins of Racial Capitalism”
Peter James Hudson
Associate Professor of African American studies and History
University of California, Los Angeles

Among the most urgent questions animating recent writing on the global history of modernity
concerns the entangled relationship between the rise of capitalism with the origins of racism and the resulting structuring of global inequalities through hierarchies of racial difference. Some of the most exciting work in this regard has been done under the banner of “racial capitalism,” a phrase largely associated with the work of Cedric Robinson. This talk is part of a larger project that explores the history and historiography of racial capitalism through an emphasis on its origins, not in Europe, but in African and the African diaspora. In the larger project, Hudson will argue that racial capitalism has been reordered as a response to Black challenges to white racial hegemony; racial capitalism, Hudson will suggest, has adapted to Black claims for political sovereignty and economic independence – especially those claims made within the registers inter-state relations and international law. This claim will be examined in the context of the revolution in Saint-Domingue that led to the establishment of the Republic of Haiti in 1804. And in particular, there will be an emphasis on the links between the slave economy of Saint-Domingue and the expansion of Philadelphia merchant-capitalism – and the aborted plans of Toussaint Louverture to end the slave trade via a military expedition to Dahomey.

Continue reading New World Migration Lecture Series

Anthropology Colloquia: Archaeologies of Whiteness from the West Indies to the West Africa

4:15pm – 6:00pm
9 November 2018
CUNY Grad Center
Room C415A
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY

“Archaeologies of Whiteness from the West Indies to the West Africa”
Matthew Reilly
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
City College, CUNY

Dr. Matthew Reilly is an anthropological archaeologist interested in race formation processes, whiteness, and colonial modernity in the Atlantic world. His work on the Caribbean island of Barbados, the subject of his forthcoming book, Archaeology below the Cliff: Race, Class, and Redlegs in Barbadian Sugar Society, explores how a group of poor whites known as the Redlegs fit within the social matrix of a system of sugar production and slavery. He is currently working on two related projects in Barbados and Liberia. His work in Barbados focuses on heritage management and the process of building futures with the material remains of the dark histories of plantation slavery. He is also collaborating on a project in the West African nation of Liberia investigating a small village established by Barbadian settlers in 1865. The project uses archaeological and ethnographic approaches to explore the process of “reverse diaspora” and settler-native interactions. At the heart of his research is a critical exploration of the complex relationships between slavery and freedom, colonialism and sovereignty, race, class, and capitalism, the social construction of race and structural racism, and the past, present, and future.

Above text adapted from webpages. Click here and here for more information.