The Department of African American Studies
Full schedule of upcoming job talks can be found at the bottom of this announcement.
Jeffrey Stewart
Distinguished Professor and MacArthur Foundation Chair, Dept. of Black Studies, UC Santa Barbara
“From Wilmington to Harlem, From Hell to Eden: What Black People Made of Free Fall”
Wednesday, March 15, 2023
11:00am – 12:30pm
HIB 135
(Masks encouraged)
Beginning with a review of the Wilmington massacre of 1898, this talk will explore the possibility of a theory of Black intellectual thought drawn from jazz—call and response--where protest and criticality are the response of William Monroe Trotter and W.E.B. Du Bois to a call for manliness, interestingly enough, from Black women, in the early twentieth century. The Guardian was more than a Black newspaper in early twentieth century Boston—it was a conceptual response to a serpentine response to Jim Crow by Booker T. Washington and later updated by Du Bois into the “Talented Tenth.” Both iterations of protest leadership would fail, however, to stop the advance of Jim Crow segregation, lynching, and political disfranchisement. Into the breach stepped Alain Locke with a different theory of race and a queer strategy of aesthetics—to use the Black body, the abject often narrated as inert, to seduce White America into a Black Eden in Harlem, itself a response to the hell of America outside.
Full Schedule of Candidate Talks for the African American Studies Full Professor Search:
joão vargas
Mar 6 10:30am-12:00pm Lecture, HG 1010: “Abolish this World: Antiblackness and the Imperative of Invention”
J. Kameron Carter
Mar 10 2:00-3:30 pm Lecture, HIB 135: "Scripturalizing, Whiteness; or, U.S. Political Theology"
Jeffrey Stewart
Mar 15 11:00am-12:30pm Lecture, HIB 135: “From Wilmington to Harlem, From Hell to Eden: What Black People Made of Free Fall”
RA Judy
Mar 21 3:00-4:00pm Lecture, HG 1010