*For an overview of IRGG's past events and sponsored talks, please refer to our newsletter: IRGG SPOTLIGHT. It can be downloaded from the hompage.*
FALL 2009
“IN THE FALLING SNOW”: AN EVENING WITH CARYL PHILLIPS
Co-sponsored by the IRGG and Labyrinth Books
Moderated by Professor Hazel Carby
Please join us for a celebration of the US publication of Caryl Phillip’s latest novel: In the Falling Snow. The novel captures issues of diasporicity, class, and race in the late modern world through the story of both a man—Keith—at a turning point in his life and of a society moving from one notion of itself to another. Phillips notes on his website: “Keith—born in the 1960s to immigrant West Indian parents, raised primarily by his white stepmother—is in his forties, a social worker heading a Race Equality unit in London whose life has come undone: separated from his wife of twenty years (her family "let her go" for marrying a black man); kept at arm's length by his seventeen-year-old son; estranged from his father; accused of harassment by a coworker. And beneath it all, a desperate feeling that his work and he himself are no longer relevant. Moving between past and present, the narrative uncovers the particulars of class, background, temperament, and desire that have brought Keith to this moment; and reveals how, often unwittingly, his wife, his son, and his father help him grasp the breadth of the changes that have occurred around him—and what those changes will require of him.”
Caryl Phillips is Professor of English at Yale University. He is the author of four books of nonfiction and seven novels. His most recent book, Dancing in the Dark, won the 2006 PEN/ Beyond Margins Award, and his previous novel, A Distant Shore, won the 2004 Commonwealth Prize, His other awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Hazel Carby is the Charles C. and Dorothea S. Dilley Professor of American Studies at Yale and the Director of Yale's Initiative on Race, Gender, and Globalization. Her books include Cultures in Babylon, Race Men, and Reconstructing Womanhood.
DATE: OCTOBER 12
TIME: 5:30pm
LOCATION: LABYRINTH BOOKS, 290 York St., New Haven
NEW DIRECTIONS IN CARIBBEAN STUDIES
Co-sponsored by the IRGG, the Center for Transnational Cultural Analysis, the Department of African American Studies, the Department of Anthropology, and the Dorothy Clarke Kemf Memorial Fund
New Directions in Caribbeans Studies aims to question the place of Caribbean Studies in the global present at the level of conception, trajectory, and the political. Working interdisciplinary across interpretive platforms in the humanities and social sciences, NEW DIRECTIONS IN CARIBBEAN STUDIES aims to come to grips with the relationship of Caribbean Studies to both modern and late modern social formations. Professor David Scott (Columbia University) will deliver the keynote for the event. Professor Scott is an internationally recognized scholar of Caribbean Studies. Since completing his last book Conscripts of Modernity he has oriented himself to the question of Third World sovereignty. In his research, he queries: What are the new local and global conditions in which the problem of sovereignty arises in – and for – the Third World? Do we live, as is suggested in some quarters, in a post-sovereign world? Is the idea of an international system of political community in which the state occupies the supreme position of adjudication now eclipsed, obsolete? Does the concept of sovereignty no longer constitute a plausible or credible way of organizing our thinking about power in the contemporary Third World? Along with pursuing answers to these questions, Professor Scott also edits the academic journal Small Axe. Please note that only the keynote event will be open to the public.
KEYNOTE: PROFESSOR DAVID SCOTT
DATE: NOVEMBER 5
TIME: 4:30pm
LOCATION: 10 Sachem St, Room 105
“BLONDE ROOTS”: AN EVENING WITH BERNARDINE EVARISTO
Co-sponsored by Labyrinth Books
Moderated by Caryl Phillips, Professor of English at Yale University
Please join us for a discussion and celebration of the publication of Bernardine Evaristo’s latest novel Blonde Roots. The novel explores many social, ethical, and historical issues: the most controversial of all being the reversal of the transatlantic slave trade. The novel concerns itself what it means for Africans to assume the role of mastery over Europeans. Evaristo notes on her website: “Welcome to a world turned upside down. Welcome to the world of Doris. One minute she’s this cute little girl playing hide-and-seek with her sisters in the fields behind their cottage. The next, someone puts a bag over her head and she ends up in the stinking hold of a slave ship sailing to the New World. When she finally arrives on a strange, tropical island, she discovers she is a pig-ugly savage with a brain the size of a pea, whose only purpose in life is to please her mistress. Doris observes slavery from both sides. As an adult she becomes the personal assistant of her formidable master, Bwana, a.k.a. Chief Kaga Konata Katamba I. She also experiences the horrors of life in the sugarcane fields, where slaves are worked to death under the blazing sun. Doris dreams of escape, of finding those she has loved and lost, of returning home to her motherland: England.” Evaristo has published one prose novel, one novella, two novels-in-verse and one novel-with-verse. She is also the recipient of the Member of the British Empire award. Please visit her website for further information: http://www.bevaristo.net
DATE: NOVEMBER 16
TIME: 5:30pm
LOCATION: LABYRINTH BOOKS, 290 York St., New Haven
AN EVENING WITH THOMAS GLAVE
Co-sponsored by Labyrinth Books
Thomas Glave is an award winning author and currently visiting Professor for 2008-09 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Glave is author of Whose Song? and Other Stories, nominated by the American Library Association for their “Best Gay/Lesbian Book of the Year” award and by the Quality Paperback Book Club for their Violet Quill/Best New Gay/Lesbian Fiction Award. His essay collection Worlds to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent, nominated for a 2006 Publishing Triangle Gay Men’s Nonfiction Award, won a 2005 Lambda Literary Award. His edited anthology our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles, was published in June 2008. For more information on Thomas Glave, please visit his website:
http://thomasglave.com
DATE: DECEMBER 7
TIME: TBA
LOCATION: LABYRINTH BOOKS, 290 YORK St. New Haven
Fall 2008
Statistics, Sex and Slavery: Women in British Colonial Slave Societies
JENNIFER MORGAN
Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU
Date: September 15, 2008
Time: 4:30pm
Location: 63 High St, Linsly-Chittenden Hall, Room 211
The Other Skin: Touch, Capitalism, and Slavery in Enlightenment America
MARK SMITH
Carolina Distinguished Professor of History, University of South Carolina
Date: September 22, 2008
Time: 4:30pm
Location: 63 High St, Linsly-Chittenden Hall, Room 211
The Noisettes: Black Female Singers and Sonic Afro-Feminist Praxis
DAPHNE BROOKS
Associate Professor of English and African American Studies, Princeton University
Date: September 29, 2008
Time: 4:30pm
Location: 63 High St, Linsly-Chittenden Hall, Room 211
The Human Project: Bodily Dystopias and the Utopics of Race
JAYNA BROWN
Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies, UC Riverside
Date: October 6, 2008
Time: 4:30pm
Location: 63 High St, Linsly-Chittenden Hall, Room 211
Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern
A Conversation with Jayna Brown
This event is co-sponsored by Labyrinth Books
Date: October 6, 2008
Time: 6:00pm
Location: Labyrinth Books, 290 York Street, New Haven
Love for the Race: Trans-National Ideality from the Age of the New Negro to Blaxploitation
This event is co-sponsored by the Program in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration
IVY WILSON
Assistant Professor of English, Northwestern University
Date: October 13, 2008
Time: 4:30pm
Location: 63 High St, Linsly-Chittenden Hall, Room 211Axis Bold as Love: On Sylvia Wynter, the Science of the Word, and More Humanly Workable Geographies--A Working Paper
KATHERINE McKITTRICK
Professor of Women's Studies, Queens University (Canada)
Date: October 20, 2008
Time: 4:30pm
Location: 63 High St, Linsly-Chittenden Hall, Room 211Abstracts of Intimacy
DARBY ENGLISH
Associate Professor of Art History, University of Chicago
Date: October 27, 2008
Time: 4:30pm
Location: 63 High St, Linsly-Chittenden Hall, Room 211Ideogrammatics as Physiognomy
ALEXANDER WEHELIYE
Associate Professor of English and African American Studies, Northwestern University
Date: November 3, 2008
Time: 4:30pm
Location: 63 High St, Linsly-Chittenden Hall, Room 211
Dust Wheel in the Ruins: Katherine Dunham's A Touch of Innocence
ANTHONY FOY
Scholar-in-Residence, Schomburg Center for the Study of Black Culture (2008-2009) & Assistant Professor of English Literature, Swarthmore
Date: November 10, 2008
Time: 4:30pm
Location: 63 High St, Linsly-Chittenden Hall, Room 211
An Exceptional Empire: Race and War in US Globalism
NIKHIL PAL SINGH
Family Professor of History, University of Washington, Seattle
Date: November 17, 2008
Time: 4:30pm
Location: 63 High St, Linsly-Chittenden Hall, Room 211
Rivers of Blood: Raciality, Violence, and the Possibility of Global Justice
Denise Ferreira da Silva
Associate Professor, Department of Ethnic Studies, UC San Diego
Date: December 1, 2008
Time: 4:30pm
Location: 63 High St, Linsly-Chittenden Hall, Room 211At the Limits of "Diaspora"? Indian Muslims in New Orleans and Harlem, 1890-1950
VIVEK BALD
Assistant Professor of Writing and Digital Media, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date: December 8, 2008
Time: 4:30pm
Location: 63 High St, Linsly-Chittenden Hall, Room 211
Spring 2008
Bodies, Bodies Everywhere: Exemplary Spectacularity as Slavery's Legacy in Jamaica
DEBORAH THOMAS
Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology and Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania
Professor Thomas works on questions concerning nationalism; globalization; race and gender; labor migration; transnationalism and diaspora; cultural politics; performance; violence and the transformation of space; culture and political Economy; popular culture; and the Caribbean.
Date: February 20th
Time: 4:30pm
Location: 63 High St, Linsly-Chittenden Hall, Room 211
Ethnicity Inc.
JOHN L. COMAROFF
Harold H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology and Social Science, University of Chicago
Professor Comaroff researches southern Africa, concentrating on the Tswana peoples. His interests include coloniality and postcoloniality, modernity, neoliberalism, social theory, and the history of consciousness; in politics, law, and historical anthropology.
Date: April 9
Time: 4:30
Location: 63 High St, Linsly-Chittenden Hall, Room 211
Plantation to the Prison:
Incarceration and U.S. Culture
Sponsors:
Initiative on Race, Gender, and Globalization; Marxist and Cultural Theory Working Group, Initiative on Labor and Culture
Featured speakers will include Ruthie Gilmore, Dylan Rodriguez, and Colin (Joan) Dayan
Date: Saturday April 12
Time: TBA
Location: Whitney Humanities Center,
53 Wall Street
Fall 2007
Shifting the Scene of the Crime:
Sodomy and the History of Rape
Stephen Robertson, History, University of Sydney
This event is sponsored by Yale's Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities
Date: September 24
Time: 5:00pm
Location: HGS 211
Stephen Robertson is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Sydney and the author of Crimes against Children: Sexual Violence and Legal Culture in New York City, 1880-1960 (UNC, 2005).
The Zong, Abolition and Public Sensibility
James Walvin, University of York
Date: October 15, 2007
Time: 4:00pm
Location: 63 High St, Linsly-Chittenden Hall, Room 211
James Walvin, Professor at the Center for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York. For over thirty years Professor Walvin’s studies of modern social history and his engagements with the history of black slavery and the Atlantic slave trade have invigorated our understanding of the Atlantic world.
The Trader, the Owner, the Slave
A Conversation between Caryl Phillips and James Walvin
This event is co-sponsored by Labyrinth Books
Date: October 15, 2007
Time: 5:30pm
Location: Labyrinth Books, 290 York Street, New Haven
In this event James Walvin and Caryl Phillips will engage James Walvin's latest book, The Trader, the Owner, the Slave.
Testimonial Event with Mak Dal Lee
Date: Linsley-Chittenden Hall (LC), Rm. 101
Time: 5:30
Location: Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Come hear the testimony of
Grandmother Mak Dal Lee,
a survivor of the
Japanese Military Sexual Slavery System
Sponsored by the American Studies Program, Asian American Cultural Center, Calhoun College, Council on East Asian Studies, Initiative on Race, Gender and Globalization, KASY: Korean American Students of Yale, Program in Ethnicity, Race and Migration, Schell Human Rights Center at Yale Law School, Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program, and the World Performance Project.
For any questions, contact elizabeth.son@yale.edu.
Cover-Up:
French Gender Equality and the Islamic Headscarf
Joan Scott, Institute for Advanced Study
This event is sponsored by Yale's Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities
Date: October 31, 2007
Time: 5:00pm
Location: HGS 211 Joan W. Scott is Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study and the author of numerous influential books and essays, including Gender and the Politics of History (1988), Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (1996), and Parité! Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism (2005). Her new book, The Politics of the Veil, will be published by Princeton University Press at the end of October. Her talk will examine the ways French arguments about the inassimilability of Muslims gained force through comparisons between French and Islamic organizations of gender and sexuality.
Reconstructing Womanhood:
A Symposium Honoring Hazel V. Carby
Date: Friday, November 2, 2007
Location: Sulzberger Parlor, Barnard Hall
Columbia University
Time: Opening Remarks, 9:30am
List of Speakers
Hazel Carby, Yale University
Lisa Lowe, University of California, San Diego
Anne McClintock, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Robert Reid-Pharr, CUNY Graduate Center
Rinaldo Walcott, University of Toronto
Conference Schedule
9:30am
Welcome and Opening Remarks: Saidiya Hartman, Columbia University
**Coffee available to participants
10:00am
“Paranoid Empire, Masculinities and Other War Zones”
Anne McClintock, University of Wisconsin-Madison
11:15am
“The Stranger’s Work: Desire, Intimacy, Violence, and (Black) Cultural Restoration”
Robert Reid-Pharr, CUNY- Graduate Center
12:30
Lunch Break
2:00pm
"Reading and Reckoning Histories of Loss"
Lisa Lowe, UC-San Diego/Yale University (in-residence)
** Coffee available to participants
3:15pm
"Reconstructing Manhood; or the Drag of Black Masculinity"
Rinaldo Walcott, University of Toronto
(Introduction/Moderator: Tina Campt, Duke University)
4:30pm
Keynote Address: "Lost (and Found?) in Translation"
Hazel V. Carby, Yale University
6:00pm
Reception/Dinner Buffet
Sponsors:
The symposium has been made possible by the generous funding of the following institutional partners: Yale University, the Office of the Provost; Barnard Center for Research on Women; Institute for Research on Women and Gender,Columbia University; Africana Studies, Barnard College; Institute for Research on African American Studies, Columbia University; Women's Studies Program, Duke University; and Columbia University Libraries.
Listening to the Image:
Diaspora, Photography and the Making of Black Britain
Tina Campt, Duke University
Date: November 7, 2007
Time: 4:30pm
Location: 63 High St, Linsly-Chittenden Hall, Room 211
Tina M. Campt is
Associate Professor of Women's Studies, History and German at Duke University, and she is presently a
William S. Vaughn Fellow at the Robert Penn Warren Humanities Ctr., Vanderbilt University.
Spring 2007
Black Sex
Rinaldo Walcott, Lecture
Date: January 31, 2007
Time: 4:30pm
Location: 63 High St,
Linsly-Chittenden Hall, Room 211
Rinaldo Walcott is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education,where he also holds the Canada Research Chair in Social Justice and Cultural Studies, at the University of Toronto. His most recent scholarship branches out from black studies to engage with other forms of marginalized difference in the Canadian nation making project. This new project, "Other Canadians and the Re-making of the Nation," will result in the "Other Canadians Database: Culture Re-making the Nation" which will consist of film and video made by "Other Canadians" that directly confronts the nation making project. He is the author of Black Like Who:? Writing Black Canada (Insomniac Press, 1997) and the editor of Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism (Insomniac Press, 2000). He was a member of the former Borderlines editorial collective and a former editorial board member of Fuse Magazine.
Lessons in Being Gay:
Queer Encounters & Gay Prison Activism
Regina Kunzel, Lecture
This event is sponsored by Yale University's
Research Initiative on the History of Sexual Identities
Date: February 5
Time: 5-6:30pm
Location: 320 York Stree, Room 211
Regina Kunzel is Fairleigh Dickinson, Jr. Professor of History at Williams College. In the 1970's and 1980's gay and lesbian activists advocated on behalf of gay prisoners, while themselves organized to claim their rights to sexual protection and expression. By exploring the understandings, misunderstandings, and awkward alliances forged between queer prison insiders and outsiders, Professor Kunzel's talk illuminates the contours of new gay norms in the making.
What the Deejay Said:
A Critique from the Street!
Conversation between Dr. William Henry & Michael Veal
This event is co-sponsored by Labyrinth Books
Date: February 23,
Time: 5:30pm to 6pm
Location: Labyrinth Books, 290 York Street, New Haven
Dr. William Henry's What the Deejay Said: A Critique from the Street! (prefaced by Paul Gilroy) engages Jamaican cultural politics in the second half of the twentieth century. Combining autobiographical reflection with the lyricism of the many pioneers who 'chatted' on Reggae Sound Systems, What the Deejay Said represents the first attempt by a Reggae Dancehall Deejay to grapple with the key role Jamaican culture played in shaping the black cultural politics of the 1970s and 1980s in the UK. As Henry's book upends what 'experts' on race said about black youth during this period, the text thoughtfully documents a 'hidden history' of the black experience in Britain, one that demonstrates the myriad ways black youth laid the foundations for transcending racism in their struggle against it.
Lose Your Mother:
A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
Conversation between Saidiya Hartman & Hazel Carby
This event is co-sponsored by Labyrinth Books
Date: February 28, 2007
Time: 4:30pm to 6pm
Location: Labyrinth Books, 290 York Street, New Haven
Saidiya Hartman is Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia University. Her book Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford UP, 1997) examines the intersections of enslavement, gender, desire, and the making of liberal reason in the United States. Her forthcoming book Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007)
confronts the disturbing relationships among memory, representation, and narrative. Weaving her own biography into an imaginative historical construction, she explores and evokes the non-spaces of black experience—the experience through which the African captive became a slave, became a non-person, became alienated from personhood.
Asylum and its Indignities
Ranjana Khanna, Public Lecture
Date: March 7, 2007
Time: 4:30pm
Location: Linsly-Chittenden Hall (LC), 101
Ranjana Khanna is Associate Professor in the Department of English and in the Program in Literature at Duke University. She is also an affiliate in Women's Studies. Her work focuses on Anglo- and Francophone Postcolonial theory and literature, Psychoanalysis, and Feminist theory. She is the author of Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2003) and has recently completed a book manuscript entitled Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation 1830 to the present (Forthcoming Stanford University Press, 2006.) Her current book manuscript in progress is called Asylum: The Concept and the Practice. She is presently a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
A Celebration of Michael Veal and Sarah Weiss's New Publications in the Field of Ethnomusicology
Date: April 11, 2007
Time: 530pm
Location: Labyrinth Books, 290 York Street, New Haven
Please join us for a book party to celebrate the publication of two new music titles by Yale ethnomusicologists Michael Veal and Sarah Weiss. In Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae, Michael Veal chronicles dub's development and offers the first thorough analysis of the music itself. Moreover, he examines dub's social significance in Jamaican culture and explores the "dub revolution" that has crossed musical and cultural boundaries for over thirty years, influencing a wide variety of musical genres around the globe. Paul Gilroy notes, "Veal's wise volume has rescued Reggae music at last from the tentacles of exoticism. This is a glorious affirmation of dub's rebel, Creole spirit."
Sarah Weiss's new book is Earlier Java: Aesthetics, Gender and the Music of Wayang in Central Java. This study is the first large-scale treatment of gender issues in Indonesian music. Integrating the analysis of gender and music with that of aesthetics, this study of the musical synergy between the puppeteer and his female accompanist describes the ways in which shifting gender constructions have helped to shape and change Central Javanese music and theatre performance practice while throwing new light on the history of Javanese gender relations and culture, as well as on the aesthetics of Central Javanese shadow-puppet theatre.
African Writers in America
Date: April 13, 2007
Time: 7pm
Location: AfroAmerican Cultural Center, 211 Park St, New Haven
A Politics of Entanglement:
Being in Johannesburg
Sarah Nuttall
Date: April 18, 2007
Time: 4:30pm
Location: LC 102
Sarah Nuttall is Associate Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
She is editor of Beautiful/Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics (Duke UP, 2006). And, she is co-editor of Text, Theory, Space: Land, Literature and History in South Africa and Australia (Routledge, 1996); Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa (OUP, 1998); Senses of Culture: South African Culture Studies (OUP, 2000); Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis (Public Culture special issue , October 2004); and
author of a forthcoming volume of essays on South African Literatures.
South Africa: The Transnational Nation?
Achille Mbembe
Date: April 25, 2007
Time: 4:30pm
Location: LC 102
Achille Mbembe is Research Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand and Senior Researcher at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research. He has published widely on African history and politics. He is author of La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun (Paris, Karthala, 1996); On the Postcolony (California UP, 2001); and he is co-editor of Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis (Public Culture special issue, October 2004).
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