Colloquium Archive

Colloquia 2004-2005

Caryl Phillips, "Border Crossings"

Wednesday, November 10, 2004; 5:00 p.m.
Hall of Graduate Studies (HGS), Room 211
320 York Street

Caryl Phillips is Professor of English and Henry R. Luce Professor of Migration and Social Order at Columbia University. He is the author of seven novels and three works of non-fiction. He has written for television, radio, theater, and cinema, and he is the editor of two anthologies. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has won the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. His most recent novels are A Distant Shore (2003) and The Nature of Blood (1997).

Jayna Brown, "The Erotic Economies of Black Bodies in Motion"

Tuesday, February 1, 2005; 1:30 p.m.
Hall of Graduate Studies (HGS), Room 217A
320 York Street

Jayna Brown is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Her research focuses on Black performance in the U.S. and elsewhere in the Diaspora, with an emphasis on vernacular dance and the body. Her manuscript, Babylon Girls: African American Women Performers and the Making of the Modern is a study of African American women dancers, singers and musicians who performed on the variety stage between 1890 and 1945. Her future research interests include conceptions of race in scientific/colonialist discourse and speculative fiction. She has published on African American race film and the Black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. She has been awarded dissertation and postdoctoral Ford Foundation Fellowships as well as a Rockefeller Award for the Study of Black Culture at the Stanford Humanities Center.

Cheryl Finley, "Joy Gregory Cinderella Stories"

Tuesday, March 29, 2005; 1:30 p.m.
Hall of Graduate Studies (HGS), Room 217A
320 York Street

Cheryl Finley is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture in the Africana Studies Department at Cornell University as well as an art critic, columnist and curator specializing in photography, African American art, cultural heritage tourism and the politics of memorialization. Prior to her appointment at Cornell, she was a visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at Wellesley College and adjunct curator in the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley. She earned her Ph.D. in African American Studies and History of Art from Yale University. She is the author of many books, articles and essays, including From Swing to Soul: An Illustrated History of African American Music from 1930 to 1960 (1994) and Harlem Guaranteed: The Photographic Legacy of James VanDerZee (2002). In 2000, she organized Imaging African Art: Documentation and Transformation at the Yale Art Gallery. She is the co-founder (with Professor Laura Wexler) of Photographic Memory Workshop at Yale University in 1998.

David A. Bailey, "Curating the Racial Experience: From Harlem to Blaxploitation"

Tuesday, April 5, 2005; 4:30 p.m.
W. L. Harkness Hall (WLH), Room 119
100 Wall Street

David A. Bailey is a photographer, writer, curator and lecturer. His work focuses on black representations in photography. Based in England, he was actively involved in setting up Autograph: The Association of Black Photographers in 1988 and the Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA) in 1994. From 1996 to 2002 he was Co-Director of the African and Asian Visual Artists' Archive (AAVAA) based at the University of East London, and he has worked as an associate curator at inIVA.

Sonia Boyce, "Painting and Beyond"

Tuesday, April 5, 2005; 1:30 p.m.
Hall of Graduate Studies (HGS), Room 217A
320 York Street

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Thursday, April 7, 2005; 4:30 p.m.
W. L. Harkness Hall (WLH), Room 119
100 Wall Street

Sonia Boyce emerged in the mid-1980s as a figurative painter and quickly became a major figure in the black British arts movement. Her works speak about racial identity and gender. Since the 1990s she has worked increasingly with what she calls "improvisational collaborations," with her concerns gradually shifting to more generic issues around public versus private space; visibility and invisibility; and desire, intimacy and multiplicity. Materially she has traveled as well, now using wallpaper, photo-media, small ads, singing and hairstyling. She has exhibited extensively in galleries throughout Britain and beyond, and her works can be found in many public collections, including the Tate and the Victoria & Albert Museum.

 

Colloquia 2005-2006

Michelle A. Stephen, “The Woman of Color and Archaeologies of Capital”

Thursday, September 22, 2005; 4:30 PM
Hall of Graduate Studies (HGS), room 119A
320 York St.

Book-Signing Party at

Thursday, September 22, 2005; 6 PM

290 York St.

 

Roundtable Discussion
Friday, September 23, 2005; 10:30 AM
313 Gordon Parks Room (AFAM)
493 College St.

Light refreshment will be provided

 

Michelle A. Stephens is Associate Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. Born and raised in Jamaica, Professor Stephens is the author of Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914-1962 (2005) and several essays on black intellectuals from the English-speaking Caribbean and the United States.

Co-sponsored by American Studies and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies

 

Anne McClintock, "Screwing the System: Sex Work, the Law and Globalization"

Thursday, October 06, 2005; 4:30 PM

Linsly-Chittenden Hall (LC), room 101

63 High St.

 

Roundtable Discussion
Friday, Oct. 07, 2005; 10:30 AM
Hall of Graduate Studies (HGS), room 105
320 York St.

 

Light refreshment will be provided

 

Anne McClintock is the Simone de Beauvoir Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Simone de Beauvoir (1990), Olive Shreiner (1991), Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (1995), and co-editor of Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives (1997), and Of Race and Queer Sexuality (1999).

 

Co-sponsored by the English Department and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies

 

Robert D. Nixon, “Environmentalism and Postcolonial Literatures”

Thursday, October 27, 2005; 4:30 PM

Hall of Graduate Studies (HGS), room 211
320 York St.

 

Roundtable Discussion

"What is a War Casualty? Environmental Perspectives on High-tech Warfare"

Reading Assignment: Rob Nixon, "Our Tools of War, Turned Blindly Against Ourselves," Chronicle of Higher Education 51, no. 24 (2005).

Friday, October 28, 2005; 10:30 AM
Hall of Graduate Studies (HGS), room 105

Light refreshment will be provided

 

Robert D. Nixon is Rachel Carson Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of Dreambirds: The Natural History of a Fantasy (2000), Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood: South African Culture and the World Beyond (1994), London Calling: V.S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin (1992), and a regular contributor to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Village Voice, The Nation, The London Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times, The TLS, and Critical Inquiry.

Co-sponsored by the English Department

 

New Paradigms for the Caribbean in the Age of Globalization

1st Annual International Conference
November 10-11, 2005
Hall of Graduate Studies (HGS), room 211
320 York Street, New Haven, CT

Schedule of Events

Thursday, November 10

4:30 - 4:45 p.m. Welcome Remarks

Hazel V. Carby, Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies and Professor of American Studies at Yale University, and Director of the Initiative on Race, Gender and Globalization.

4:45 - 6:00 p.m. Keynote Address

Nalo Hopkinson

"Island Girl: What You Wantin' With De White Man's World?" (or, 'What's a Black Girl Like You Doing Writing Science Fiction?')"

Nalo Hopkinson is the author of Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), Midnight Robber (2000), Skin Folk (2000), The Salt Roads (2003), Mojo: Conjure Stories (2003), So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy (2004), and numerous short stories.

Friday, November 11

9:30 a.m. Continental Breakfast

10:00 - 12:30 a.m Panel One: Politics and Culture

Tony Bogues (Brown University), "The Politics of Power and Violence: Rethinking the Political in the Caribbean"

Michelle A. Stephens (Mount Holyoke College), "Re-imagining Sovereignty in the Multiple Caribbean"

Deborah Thomas (Duke University), "Violence, Space, and Remapping Globality: New Frontiers in Jamaica"

1:30 - 4:00 p.m. Panel Two: Diasporic Fictions

Belinda Edmondson (Rutgers University), "Caribbean Middlebrow: Global Popular Culture and the Caribbean Middle Class"

Rhonda Frederick (Boston College), "Migrating Fictions: Jamaican Culture and Globalization"

Nicole King (University of California, San Diego), "Unstable Foundations: Reading Representations of Family, The Body and Diaspora"

4:0 - 4:30 p.m. Tea

4:30 - 6:00 p.m. Closing Remarks

David Scott (Columbia University)

Co-sponsored by The Council on Latin American and Iberian Studies, American Studies and African American Studies

Susan Willis, "To Err on the Side of Life"

 

Wednesday, November 30, 2005; 4:30 PM
Hall of Graduate Studies (HGS), room 119B

 

 

Susan Willis is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Duke University. She is the author of Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience (1987), A Primer for Daily Life (1990), and most recently, Portents of the Real: A Primer for Post-9/11 America (2005). She has co-authored Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Walt Disney World (1995)