Liberation movements have received very little scholarly attention. While much of this research has focused on comparative analyses, of the French, Russian and Chinese revolutionary movements there has been very little cross-national comparative research from an interdisciplinary perspective about movements for national liberation in the black diaspora. This interdisciplinary panel explores the historical, cultural and political dynamics of movements of national liberation in the black diaspora as they have emerged in the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean. The panel will highlight similarities and differences in the organizational structures, the political strategies, and how the historical legacy of these movements motivate and inspire contemporary political strategies of social movements like Black Live Matters.

Clinton Hutton is professor of Politics in the Department of Government at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Kingston, Jamaica. Dr. Hutton’s research focus on Jamaican oral history, Africana culture and religions, philosophy and popular culture.  His primary interest has been the persistent legacy of African political philosophical thought and its influence on the world views of Afro-Caribbean people. His body of work is a major contributor to the fields of Caribbean political philosophy and to the study of the Haitian Revolution and the Morant Bay Rebellion.  Dr. Hutton’s book entitled: The Logic and Historical Significance of the Haitian Revolution and the Cosmological Roots of Haitian Freedom (Arawak Publications, 2005) as well as his later book entitled: Colour for Colour, Skin for Skin: Marching with the Ancestral Spirits into War Oh at Morant Bay (Ian Randle Publishers, 2015), both examine the African philosophical race-based heritage that influenced the Haitian Revolution and the later Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica.

Francis Musoni is associate Professor of African History in the Department of History at the University of kentucky. Dr. Musoni’s research focuses on migrations and cross-border mobilities, borderland communities, refugees, ethnic identities and informal economies in Africa. Dr. Musoni is the author of “Contested Illegality: Border Jumping and the Control of Mobility across the Zimbabwe-South Africa Border (Indiana University Press). His current research focus on the biography of one the founding leaders of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), a nationalist movement that spearheaded the 1970s armed struggle for independence in Zimbabwe (Rhodesia). His research seeks to unpack the complex interplay of local, national, regional and global forces that shaped the struggles for liberation and democracy in Zimbabwe.

Ricky L. Jones is professor and Chair of the Pan-African Studies Department at the University of Louisville. Dr. Pack is the author of two editions of Black Haze: Violence, Sacrifice, and Manhood in Black Greek-Letter Fraternities ( SUNY Press, 2015), as well as the author of What’s Wrong with Obamamania?: Black America, Black Leadership, and the Death of Political Imagination (SUNY Press, 2008). Dr. Jones is the host of the award-winning "Ricky Jones Show" on The REAL 93.1 FM Louisville from iHeart Media.

Vanessa Holden is assistant professor of African American and Africana Studies History in the Department of History at the University of kentucky. Dr. Holden’s areas of research interest are the history of resistance and rebellion in the antebellum South.

As the 2020 presidential election nears, we are facing strident and sometimes hate-filled campaign verbiage, even in the most mainstream of publications.  As was true in 2016, many observers express surprise at the coarseness of the language of the campaign. It is worthwhile to compare the rhetoric of the recent campaigns with those in 2008 and 2012 when Barack Obama and his family were also subject to outrageous accusations, although in these elections, the attacks rarely surfaced in the respectable press outlets.  As a result, many political watchers assumed that they represented fringe points of view that would never enjoy respectability. This paper will make the case that such observers were wrong.

Patricia A. Turner is the Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education and a Professor in the Department of African American Studies and World Arts and Culture at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on racial dynamics as they surface in folklore and popular culture. Her fourth book, Crafted Lives: Stories and Studies of African-American Quilters was published by University of Mississippi Press in 2009. She is also the author of Whispers on the Color Line: Rumor and Race in America (with Gary Alan Fine) (2004), Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influence on Culture (2002), I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture (1994). She is currently writing a monograph on legends and beliefs about Barack and Michelle Obama.

Part of the Africana Saturday School Double Lecture Series.  

This event features a lecture on the historic Tuskegee Airmen. Note: panel on the topic of women in the military has been rescheduled to April 16, time and location TBD.

Ron Spriggs, a Lexington-based historian and curator of a traveling exhibit on the Tuskegee Airmen, will present. The Tuskegee Airmen, a group of African-American military pilots and their support personnel who fought in World War II, were the first African-American military aviators in the U.S. armed forces. Spriggs focuses on two main areas that parallel the national Tuskegee Airmen organization: sustaining the legacy and history of the airmen through student lectures, speaking engagements and exhibitions; and creating programs and experiences for students to develop their knowledge about careers in aviation or their general academic studies.

Social media has become a tool used to create academic communities that literally have no boundaries. Beginning with blogs and community building websites, specifically platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, or Tumblr, individuals from underrepresented minority groups have collaborated with like-minded individuals for academic purposes, support, and true advocacy of neglected populations.

This hybrid event, open to students, faculty, and staff, offers the opportunity for participants to explore the concept of integration and to define what that means at the University of Kentucky. As they are prompted to think about what we can all do in our respective inter-campus communities to begin to move steps beyond inclusion and into creating equity in the classroom, residence hall, office, or even more broadly within programs and student organizations, participants will leave this lunch workshop/discussion having identified an opportunity to enhance equity in their area of work and/or with a concrete idea for implementing some action.

Every year, the Anthropology Graduate Student Association (AGSA) invites an outstanding anthropologist from outside the university to give a public talk as part of our Distinguished Lecturer Series. For 2020, we are pleased to host Dr. Khiara Bridges, Professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law and former Associate Dean of Equity, Justice, and Engagement at Boston University.

Khiara M. Bridges is a professor of law at UC Berkeley School of Law. She has written many articles concerning, race, class, reproductive rights, and the intersection of the three. Her scholarship has appeared or will soon appear in the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the California Law Review, and the Virginia Law Review, among others. She is also the author of three books: Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization (2011), The Poverty of Privacy Rights (2017), and Critical Race Theory: A Primer (2019). She is a coeditor of a reproductive justice book series that is published under the imprint of the University of California Press.

Deborah Gray White is the Board of Governors Professor of History and Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University.  During her twenty-six years at Rutgers, she has not only been a teacher but the codirector of "The Black Atlantic: Race, Nation and Gender" project at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis (1997-99), a research professor at the Rutgers Institute for Research on Women (1999-2000), and chair of the history department (2000-03).

In November 2015, Rutgers University's Chancellor Edwards created the Committee on Enslaved and Disenfranchised Populations in Rutgers History and named White as Chair. The Committee traced the university’s early history and its relationship with local African-American and Native-American communities.With active participation from students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, faculty, staff, local historians, and librarians, the committee has conducted painstaking research to reexamine the university’s roots, including locating and studying the wills of Rutgers’ founders and benefactors and other archived documents. The result was the Scarlet and Black Project, which has produced two volumes related to Black and Native people's interaction with the university.

Professor White is the author of Ar'n't I A Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (Norton, 1985). A second edition, with a new introduction and additional chapter, was issued in 1999. In anticipation of its anniversary, the Southern Historical Association celebrated it at its 2003 conference; and in 2005 a conference entitled "Slave Women's Lives: Twenty Years of 'Ar'n't I A Woman?' and More" was held at the Huntington Institute in California, with the proceedings published in the 2007 Winter issue of the Journal of African American Studies; the papers presented in honor of it at the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women were published in the Journal of Women's History in July 2007.

Her other monographs are Let My People Go: African-Americans, 1804-1860 (Oxford UP, 1996) and Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (Norton, 1999). Professor Gray White contributed a number of articles to the Journal of American History, Journal of Caribbean Studies, Journal of Family History, and Journal of African American History. She is also the editor of Telling Histories: Black Women Historian in the Ivory Tower (University of North Carolina Press, 2008), and, with Darlene Clark Hine and others, Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (Oxford UP, 2004). She received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Fellowship, the ACLS, the American Association of University Women, and the National Research Council / Ford Foundation.

Selected Publications

• Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower, ed.  (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming 2008)
• Too Heavy A Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999)
• Let My People Go: African American 1800-1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)
• Ar’n’t I A Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985, 1999 [2nd ed])

In progress:

“’Can’t We All Just Get Along’: The Cultural Awakenings of the 1990’s” - This book recounts the history of the 1990’s through the lens of the decade’s mass marches and gatherings. The Million Man March, the Million Woman March, the Promise Keepers, the LGBT Marches, and the Million Mom March tell us a lot about sexuality, and the state of American race, class, and gender relations. Separately, and in conversation with each other, they allow for an in-depth analysis of subjects like coalition building, intraracial and interracial faith, marriage and family relationships. In conversation with the past they speak to the continuing processes of millennialism and post-modernism. As such they are powerfully revelatory about American identity (ies) at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Mr. Zamora’s workshop will use headlines regarding immigration to lead students and other attendees in creating their own micro-poems. The workshop will conclude with an opportunity for attendees to share their work and a Q&A with the poet.

Event speaker: Javier Zamora holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied and taught in June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program and earned an MFA from New York University. His poems have been featured in Granta, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The New York Times and many others. Zamora has received many honors, including a 2015 NEA fellowship, the 2016 Ruth Lilly Fellowship, a 2016-2018 Wallace Stegner Fellowship, among other accolades. He’s a founding member of the Undocupoets, a group dedicated to promoting undocumented poets and raising awareness of the structural barriers they face in the literary community.